We kept on drifting, calling out different things to each other, and beginning to feel almost cheerful when we saw ourselves getting nearer and nearer the island.
Poetry actually called out to me once, “Say, Bill! What direction are we floating?”
That made me think that, on a map that was hanging on a wall, straight south was straight down!! So I yelled back at him, just as a big wave came between us and we couldn’t see each other, “If we hadn’t put on our life preservers, we’d have all floated straight south.”
Even though we still didn’t feel safe, I knew we were. Yet my feelings and what I knew kept arguing with each other, with my feelings getting the best of the argument most of the time. For a minute I thought of what Little Jim, the best Christian in our gang and maybe in the whole world, would say if he was with us. I thought maybe he’d say something like this, “That goes to show that if a boy has Jesus for his Savior, he is saved, whether he feels it all the time or not.”
In another five or ten minutes, though, we’d be to the island, and there maybe we could start a fire with a bow and a stick and some string, as Barry’d been teaching us how to do, and we could send up smoke signals the way Scouts do, and somebody would see them and come to our rescue. It’d be fun being marooned on an island for a while.
“Heyl Look!” Dragonfly called to us. “The wind’s going to blow us past the island!”
We looked, and Dragonfly was right. We were going to miss the island, unless—unless we could swim a little against those waves and keep from drifting by. If we drifted past the island, we’d have to drift for a lot of miles before we’d ever get to land, because the shore on the other side of it was a long way off.
Just then Poetry yelled, “Now this crazy old northern’s got himself buried on the bottom of the lake and won’t budge.” He was holding his pole up in the air, and the reel was spinning around and around as the waves washed him toward me.
“Jerk him!” I called back. “Make him mad! Then maybe he’ll—”
Poetry jerked. A minute later he was winding in his line again, which meant the fish was following along behind us somewhere.
And just that minute I heard a roaring. It sounded like an airplane. I looked up but didn’t see anything. I did see that we were going to miss the island, so I hollered to Poetry to let the fish go and to start to swim, or we’d have to stay in the water maybe all the rest of the morning.
But it was too late. Dragonfly was already starting past the island, and I would be in a minute, and so would Poetry.
“Look!” Dragonfly cried again. “Somebody’s coming in a boat!”
Again he was right. Straight toward us from across the lake came a big white boat that looked like Santa’s. A high-powered motor was carrying that boat roarity-sizzle toward the island and us!
“Hurrah!” I yelled. “We’re saved!”
And we were! It was Santa’s boat. In the prow was Little Tom Till, holding on tight and with his life preserver on, and back in the stern were Barry and Big Jim.
It didn’t take us long to get rescued after that. Dragonfly and I were in the boat in a jiffy.
Poetry was still holding onto his fishing pole. Just as quick as he was in, he started working on Old Northern, and within about three minutes, with a big gaff hook that Barry had in the boat, we had landed him.
Talk about a fish! We never did quit talking about it, Poetry especially.
It was a wet but happy boatful of people that went back across those high waves, roarity-sizzle, toward camp. And it was a tired and hungry three of us who, after we’d changed clothes, sat down with Barry at the dinette end of the trailer and ate pancakes and bacon and grapefruit for breakfast.
“How’d you know where to find us?” I asked, sort of chopping off the last two words when I bit off a nice juicy bite of pancake.
“Easy,” Barry said. “Tom was out looking at the lake with your binoculars, and he saw you.”
You can guess we were glad we’d invited Little Tom Till to go along with us on our camping trip!
Maybe I ought to tell you—before we came back from the island, we pulled Eagle Eye’s boat up onto the shore away from the waves and took the little motor off and brought it back with us. As soon as the lake got quiet again, we’d go back to the island and get it.
The motor would have to have something done to it, of course, because it was all water soaked. I was just glad it had stayed fastened onto the boat, or it would have been lying down on the bottom of the lake somewhere, as Barry says hundreds of motors are all over America because somebody has been careless or has had an accident he couldn’t help.
Well, I looked across the table at Dragonfly and Poetry and then down the length of the trailer at Big Jim and Circus and Little Jim and Tom, sitting there on the davenport, watching us eat and listening to us talk. I was very glad to be alive. Everything was quiet for a minute, and I could hear the drip-drip of water as the ice slowly melted in the icebox.
Just then Little Jim turned around to where the radio was sitting on the shelf behind him and turned it on. “It’s time for the ‘Children’s Gospel Hour,’” he said. And in a minute we heard the voices of a lot of boys and girls singing a chorus we’d learned only a few nights before at our campfire:
“Broadcast the gospel everywhere,
Tell it to sinners far and near;
Christ, God’s Son upon Calvary’s tree,
Paid the ransom for you and for me;
Broadcast the gospel everywhere.”
Between songs, I asked Circus, “Will you dedicate a song to us when you get to Chicago next Thanksgiving?”
“Sure,” Circus said, grinning. “I’ll even dedicate a piece of turkey to you when I eat it,” which made Poetry frown and made me wish harder than ever that Santa would invite the whole gang to go along with Circus. I’d never had an airplane ride. And I’d never been in Chicago. Or in a broadcasting studio.
Looking back over this story, I see it’s as long as it ought to be. So I’ll have to skip all the things that happened the second week of our camping trip. It was a great week, though, and we had the time of our lives.
Paul Hutchens
MOODY PRESS
CHICAGO
©1941, 1997 by
PAULINE HUTCHENS WILSON
Revised Edition, 1997
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.
All Scripture quotations are taken from the New American Standard Bible, © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, and 1994 by The Lockman Foundation, La Habra, Calif. Used by permission.
Original Title: Sugar Creek Gang in Chicago
ISBN: 0-8024-7009-2
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.
Now the years have passed—more than fifty, actually. My father is in heaven, but the Gang goes on. All thirty-six books are still in print and now are being updated for today’s readers with input from my five children, who also span the decades from the ’50s to the ’70s.
The real Sugar Creek is in Indiana, and my father and his six brothers were the original Gang. But the idea of the books and their ministry were and are the Lord’s. It is He who keeps the Gang going.
PAULINE HUTCHENS WILSON
1
Roaring along throu
gh the sky 5,000 feet high—which is almost a mile—and at 400 miles an hour was the most thrilling experience of my life up to that time.
Well, come to think of it, I guess riding on the waves of a mad lake, with nothing to hold me up except a life-preserver vest, was really the most thrilling as well as the craziest. As I told you in my last story about the Sugar Creek Gang, being tossed around by those big angry waves was like being scared half to death riding on a Tilt-A-Whirl at a county fair.
I had thought maybe an airplane ride would be even worse. It wasn’t at all, but, boy, oh boy, was it different!
Of course none of us thought that Dragonfly, who is the balloon-eyed member of our gang, would get a bad case of vertigo and have to have the stewardess give him first aid to bring him back to normal again. In fact, the pilot actually had to come down to a lower altitude before Dragonfly was all right.
That’s getting too far ahead of the story though, and I’ll have to wait a chapter or two before I explain what vertigo means.
I’m going to be a doctor when I grow up, you know, and that’s why I’m learning the names of all the medical terms I can while I’m little, which I’m not actually anymore. I’m already ten and three-fourths years old and have red hair and—but it wouldn’t be fair to tell you about myself before introducing the rest of the gang.
The Sugar Creek Gang is the most important gang in the whole country, maybe. Anyway, we have more twisted-up adventures than most anybody else in the world, and so far they have all come out all right.
Maybe I’d better take time right now to introduce the members of the gang to you—and to explain why we were taking an airplane ride and where to.
You remember that Circus, who is our acrobat and who also has an acrobatic voice that can climb the musical scale even better than he can climb a tree, had been invited to a big Chicago church to sing over the radio on Thanksgiving Day. Well, the date was changed, and he was going to sing at what is called a youth rally on Labor Day weekend in September instead, and all the gang was going with him.
Little Jim, the littlest and the grandest guy in the gang, and maybe in the whole world, had to go with him to accompany him on the piano anyway, he being an expert pianist. So, of course, we all wanted to go along, and our parents had said we could—that is, they had finally said we could.
It took my brownish-gray-haired mom quite awhile to make up her mind to let me go, and I had to wash dishes every noon for all the rest of the summer just to show my appreciation. I even had to do them as if I liked to—while I didn’t, although I was beginning to have sense enough not to say so.
The day Mom finally made up her mind was one of the hottest days we’d had that year. I actually never had felt such tired weather in all my life. You could lie right down after eating a dinner of fried chicken, noodles, buttered mashed potatoes, and raspberry shortcake, and go to sleep in less than a minute. You could stay asleep all the way through dishwashing time—that is, if Mom didn’t get tired of waiting for you to come and help, and call you.
You could even sleep better if you knew that, after the dishes were done, there were potatoes to hoe and beans to pick. But if you happened to be going swimming, or if there was going to be a gang meeting, you weren’t even sleepy.
That afternoon there were beans to be picked, so as soon as I had finished my shortcake, I asked to be excused. Dad said yes and let me get up and go into our living room, which was the coolest room in the house, and lie down on the floor until Mom had the dishes ready.
Mom’s floor was always clean, but even at that she always made me lay a paper on it before I could put a pillow down to sleep on. I hadn’t any more than lain down, it seemed, when her voice came sizzling in from the kitchen and woke me up.
I didn’t like to wake up any more than I did any other time. I’d been dreaming the craziest dream. Anyway, it seemed crazy at the time, and anybody would have laughed at it. I never realized, while I was dreaming, that something was going to happen almost like that in real life after we got to Chicago.
I dreamed that I was already a doctor and that I was in a hospital with a lot of nurses in white all around. Also, all around and overhead, airplane engines were droning. One of the members of the Sugar Creek Gang had eaten too much raspberry shortcake and had a stomachache, and the only thing that would help him was for me, the doctor, to give him a blood transfusion. In my dream I was pouring raspberry juice into one of the veins of his arm through a little tin funnel, and he was crying and saying, “I don’t like to wash dishes! I don’t want to!”
That was when Mom called me to wake up and come to help her.
I woke up halfway at first, and I was as cross as anything, which any doctor will tell you is natural for anybody when he gets waked up without wanting to be.
But my dad, who is a Christian and knows the Bible from A to Z—and not only says he is a Christian, but actually acts like one at home as well as in church—he says the Bible says, “Be angry, and yet do not sin.” And that means if somebody or something makes you angry, you ought to tie up your anger, the way people do a mad bull, and not let it run wild.
Dad says a boy’s temper under control is like a fire in a stove, useful for many things. But when it isn’t controlled, it’s like a fire in a haymow or a forest. Some people actually die many years sooner than they ought to because they get mad so many times and stay mad so long it makes them sick.
Maybe my dad tells me these things especially because I’m red-haired and maybe am too quick-tempered. He says if I don’t lose my temper all the time, but keep it under control, it’ll help me do many important things while I’m growing up.
So, as angry as I was for being waked up and for having to do dishes, I tied up my anger as quick as I could. I didn’t say a word or grumble or anything. I didn’t even frown.
By the way, do you know how many muscles of your face have to work to make a fierce-looking frown? Maybe you wouldn’t believe it, but it actually takes sixty-five, our teacher says. And it takes only thirteen muscles to make a smile. So it’s a waste of energy to go around frowning when you’re already tired and lazy.
While on the way from the living room to the kitchen to help Mom, I remembered something Dad had told me one day when I was going around our barnyard with a big scowl on my very freckled face. This is what he said: “Bill Collins, you’re making the same face while you’re a boy that you’ll have to look at in the mirror all the rest of your life.”
That had made me scowl deeper than ever, and I went toward the barn still scowling but not saying anything. The minute I got into the barn, though, I took out of my pocket a little round mirror that I was carrying and looked at myself. And because I was angry, I scowled and scowled and made a fierce face and stuck out my tongue at myself and hated myself for a while.
Then I saw a big, long brown rat dart across the barn floor, and in a flash I was chasing after it and calling old Mixy-cat to come and do her work and see to it that there weren’t so many live rats around the Collins family’s barn.
What Dad had said didn’t soak in at all until one day Mom told me almost the same thing, only in different words.
My mom has the kindest face I ever saw, and her forehead is very smooth, without any deep creases in it—either going across it or running up and down. Just for fun one day I asked her if she’d been ironing it, it was so smooth, and do you know what she said?
She said, “I’ve been ironing it all my life. I’ve kept the frowns and wrinkles off ever since I was a little girl, so the muscles that make frowns and wrinkles won’t have a chance to grow”—which they will if they get too much exercise.
So it would be better for even a girl to be cheerful while she’s little enough to be still growing, so she’ll have a face like my mom’s when she gets big.
Well, I thought all those thoughts even before I was halfway to the kitchen. On the way, I stepped into our downstairs bedroom for a half jiffy to look at Charlotte Ann. She was my one-year-old baby si
ster and had pretty brownish-red curls and several small freckles on her nose. She was supposed to be sleeping and wasn’t. She was lying there holding a toy in one hand and shaking it and trying to take it apart to see what made it rattle.
I stood looking down at her pretty pink cheeks, and her brownish-red hair, and her chubby little fists, and at the kind of disgusted pucker on her forehead because the toy wouldn’t come apart.
“Listen, Charlotte Ann,” I said, scowling at her, “you’re making the same kind of face now you’ll have to look at in the mirror all the rest of your life. You’ve got to think pretty thoughts if you want to have a pretty face.”
Then I went out into the kitchen and washed my hands with soap, which is what you’re supposed to do before you dry dishes, or else maybe Mom will have to wash the dishes over again and the drying towel too.
I still felt cranky, but I kept thinking about the airplane trip the gang was going to take to Chicago—all the gang except me, so far—so I kept my fire in the stove. I knew that pretty soon my parents would have to decide something, and I kept on hoping it would be “Yes.”
My mom had been teaching me to sing tenor, and sometimes on Sunday nights, when she’d play the organ in our front room, she and Dad and I would sing trios, which helped to make us all like each other better. So while we were doing dishes that noon, Mom and I started singing different songs we used in school and also some of the gospel songs we used in church. And the next thing we knew, the dishes were done and put away, and I was free to go and pick beans if I wanted to, or if I didn’t want to.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 1-6 Page 32