And then came two more surprises. First, our pastor announced that we had a retired missionary in the audience. He asked Ben Robinson to stand for everybody to see him.
The other surprise came while we were singing the closing hymn. I heard a pretty contralto voice from somewhere behind me. I quick turned my head and found it was Miss Trillium, who also was visiting our church that day. Her face was very happy, and I felt sure she was thinking, All human beings are the handwriting of God. The Creator writes with different colored ink.
And just as it had been in school the morning she had told us that, it seemed the Creator was in our church in a special way.
I was sorry I had let the hot weather make me sleepy and that I had missed part of the sermon. I didn’t get to find out what I’d missed until the gang’s meeting that afternoon.
We met first at the Little Jim Tree—all of us except Dragonfly, who hadn’t been meeting with us lately, anyway. We all still didn’t feel very friendly toward him, and he seemed afraid to come over to any of our houses. One thing we had found out for sure was that he was not the person who had torn down our tree house. Some evil-minded vandals had.
From the Little Jim Tree, we lazied across the battleground of the Battle of Bumblebee Hill and on up to the cemetery, where, at Sarah Paddler’s grave, we all stopped and stared at what we saw.
Three tombstones were there instead of just two. We’d seen the two many a time. One, as you know, was Sarah Paddler’s, Old Man Paddler’s wife who had been dead a long time. The other was for the old man himself. Of course, Old Man Paddler was still alive, but he had had his stone put up ahead of time with his name on it and the date of his birth. There was a vacant place on the stone where somebody someday would have to put in the date of his death.
But the thing that had stopped us was a brand-new marker, a little different in shape, shining in the sun just a few feet from the others.
Little Jim spoke first, piping up with a question, “How come there isn’t any mound of fresh earth, if somebody’s been just buried here?”
“Yeah,” I said. “How come?” I was remembering the truck I’d seen driving inside the stone fence yesterday.
We all found out “how come” when we saw the words on the new tombstone, which were:
ELIZABETH ROBINSON
Runaway Slave
Set free forever through the blood of Christ
Just below were two dates, one for when she was born and the other for when she died. Just below the dates was a baby lamb and, below that, two of the saddest words I’d ever seen anywhere:
LITTLE BENNY
We all sort of came to, and Circus told us, “The actual grave is over there just outside the rail fence under the blackberry bushes. I know, because I helped Mr. Robinson measure the distances on his map. Old Man Paddler wanted the tombstone put up inside the cemetery and on his own family lot. That’s how come it’s here.”
“Listen!” Poetry whispered to us. “Somebody’s coming.”
And somebody was. I knew who, when I heard a long-tailed, wheezy sneeze.
Quicker than five chipmunks, we obeyed Big Jim’s order to hide. And a few seconds later we were all over the fence and crouched down out of sight.
I peeped between two stones and saw Dragonfly, carrying a bouquet of flowers in a milk bottle.
Dragonfly stood where we had been a little while before. He looked at the new stone and what was on it. Then he kept on standing with the bottle of flowers in his hands.
He looked all around, as if he wanted to be sure nobody was seeing him. Then he carried his bouquet to the new tombstone and set it down carefully, just below the lamb and the words “Little Benny.”
I could hardly believe my eyes—although I couldn’t see too well, since I was watching through a crack between the stones, and the leaves of a sweetbrier bush on the other side kept blowing across my peephole.
Right that second, Little Jim, who was beside me and trying to peek over the top of the fence so that he could see, too, accidentally knocked a rock loose.
The rock made a scratching sound as it fell off the wall on the other side of the fence and rolled toward the pine tree near Sarah Paddler’s tombstone.
Dragonfly jumped as though he had heard a shot. Then he whirled around and ran like a scared cottontail toward the other side of the cemetery, not stopping until he had reached the rail fence, where he crawled through and disappeared.
When, a little later, we were all back in front of the new gravestone, not a one of us said a word for what seemed a long time.
Poetry was the first to say anything. “History,” he said, “has repeated itself.” Then he quoted part of a poem, which I will quote here for you and which makes a nice way to end this story, just before I dive headfirst into the next one.
No more shall the war cry sever
Or the winding rivers be red;
They banish our anger forever
When they laurel the graves of our dead.
The civil war in the Sugar Creek Gang was over, and we were all going to be friends again.
Little Jim came up with a suggestion that was just like him, when he said, “I move we go hunt up Dragonfly and tell him.”
Big Jim’s answer was, “The motion is carried.”
He hadn’t even waited for anybody to second the motion or bothered to ask us to vote. There wasn’t a one of us that wasn’t willing to forgive Dragonfly. He had banished our anger forever when he had decorated the grave of Mr. Robinson’s mother and his twin brother, little Benny.
Big Jim’s words were ringing in my ears as all five of us started off on a fast barefoot run toward the place where we’d last seen Dragonfly. I had to run pretty carefully on my still-bandaged ankle. But I was glad I didn’t have to use crutches or wear an artificial limb, and I was feeling fine inside that Dragonfly’s rebellion was over.
As we raced along, all kinds of butterflies and dragonflies were everywhere on the lazy afternoon air. The smell of wildflowers was enough to make a boy dizzy. It seemed everything in nature had a pure heart—even the dragonflies.
That night at the supper table, Dad surprised Mom and me by saying, “I stopped at the Gilberts this afternoon. And guess what?”
When neither Mom nor I could guess what, Dad cleared his throat the way he sometimes does when he is about to say something extra-important and announced, “Ben Robinson has just moved into unit twelve and is going to stay for a week. I think I never saw LeRoy and Lilly so happy.”
I was still a little bothered about Dragonfly’s getting all the credit for saving the old man’s life, though, so I asked, “What about LeRoy’s son? Was he happy about it?”
Dad quick looked at me as if I shouldn’t have asked such a question. Then he used his teaching voice to say, “Never judge any person by what he was yesterday, if he is a new man today.”
Just that minute, from outdoors somewhere there came the cheerful whistle of Mom’s favorite bird, the cardinal, and it seemed that instead of whistling, “Cheer! Cheer! Cheer!” he was calling, “Peace! Peace! Peace!”
It also seemed my mother was answering him when she looked across the corner of the table at the world’s best father and said, “God is still on the throne.”
Charlotte Ann didn’t know what was going on in our minds. Right that minute she finished her chocolate milk and held out her cup for more.
The Sugar Creek Gang Series:
The Swamp Robber
The Killer Bear
The Winter Rescue
The Lost Campers
The Chicago Adventure
The Secret Hideout
The Mystery Cave
Palm Tree Manhunt
One Stormy Day
The Mystery Thief
Teacher Trouble
Screams in the Night
The Indian Cemetery
The Treasure Hunt
Thousand Dollar Fish
The Haunted House
Lost in the Blizzard
On the Mexican Border
The Green Tent Mystery
The Bull Fighter
The Timber Wolf
Western Adventure
The Killer Cat
The Colorado Kidnapping
The Ghost Dog
The White Boat Rescue
The Brown Box Mystery
The Watermelon Mystery
The Trapline Thief
The Blue Cow
Treehouse Mystery
The Cemetery Vandals
The Battle of the Bees
Locked in the Attic
Runaway Rescue
The Case of Missing Calf
Paul Hutchens
MOODY PUBLISHERS
CHICAGO
© 1961, 1999 by
PAULINE HUTCHENS WILSON
Revised Edition, 1999
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.
Cover Design: Ragont Design
Cover Illustration: Don Stewart
Original Title: The Worm Turns at Sugar Creek
ISBN: 978-0-8024-7037-9
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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
It hardly seems fair to blame my Saturday afternoon’s unusual punishment on what a half-dozen innocent-looking fishing worms did Friday. But how else can I make anybody understand that I, Theodore Collins’s first and worst son, wasn’t 100 percent to blame?
Of course, I didn’t realize while I was being punished—the punishment actually lasted several hours—that what was happening to me would help the gang capture a couple of prodigal sons who had been committing vandalism in and around Sugar Creek.
One of the worst things the vandals had done was to fill our spring reservoir with marsh mud. Another had been to chop a hole in the bottom of our rowboat. Also, somebody— maybe the same ornery boys—had written filthy words and drawn obscene pictures with chalk on the large, red, cylinder-shaped Sugar Creek bridge abutments.
But the very worst act of vandalism was what we discovered Thursday afternoon when we came back from our trip up into the hills, where we’d gone to look after Old Man Paddler’s place.
That kind, long-whiskered old man had gone off to California for a vacation. Before he left, he had given us the responsibility of watering his house plants, filling his birdbath in the backyard patio, and—twice a week—mowing his lawn. As payment for the work, he was going to give us a whole dollar apiece, which, added up, would total six dollars, since there were that many boys in our gang.
The hole chopped in our boat stirred our tempers plenty, I tell you. And we got even madder in our minds when we saw the words on the bridge, words that weren’t fit to toss into a garbage pail, and pictures that were worse to look at than a polecat is to smell.
But Thursday afternoon, when we found Old Man Paddler’s wife’s tombstone defaced and lying on its side in the cemetery at the top of Bumblebee Hill, that was too much to take. It just didn’t seem possible that anybody in his right mind—if he had one—would want to chop a hole in a rowboat, contaminate a neighborhood’s drinking water, and—worst of all-do what had been done to a dead person’s gravestone! What would Old Man Paddler think, and how would he feel when he found out about it?
Maybe I’d better tell you about that Thursday afternoon right now so you’ll understand why we were so boiling mad at the vandals, whoever they were.
And who were they? Were they some boys from another county who had moved into the neighborhood or somebody who already lived here? I guess maybe we all had our minds focused on the same person, but up to then we hadn’t used any names in the things we had been saying—we were only getting more and more stirred up inside.
From Old Man Paddler’s place, we had come past the spring, which we’d already cleaned out, and got a drink. Then we went over to the Little Jim Tree at the bottom of Bumblebee Hill to rest awhile and to talk and also to postpone a little longer having to go to our different homes, where there would be a lot of work to do. It was almost time to start the evening chores.
The Little Jim Tree was one of our favorite meeting places. We liked to lie there in the shade and remember the time Little Jim, using Big Jim’s rifle, had shot and killed a fierce old mother bear. If he hadn’t pulled the trigger when we yelled for him to, Little Jim might have been buried up there in the cemetery himself.
The minute we all came puffing from our fast run to the place we’d planned to meet and rest awhile, Little Jim plopped himself down on the grass at the very spot where the bear had done her dying and leaned his shoulder against the tree trunk. I think he felt kind of proud that we had named the tree after him.
The rest of us were lying in different directions, just thinking about what had been going on around the neighborhood. Still, not a one of us mentioned any name or names of anybody who might be guilty.
Big Jim, our fuzzy-mustached leader, was sitting with his knees drawn up to his chin, leaning back a little and rocking, with his fingers laced together around his shins. His face, I noticed, was set. The muscles of his jaw were tensing and untensing, the way they do when he is thinking. He was the first one to speak. “You boys remember the Battle of Bumblebee Hill?”
We remembered, all right, and several of us said so.
Then Big Jim spoke again. “Any of you remember who was the leader of the gang we had our fight with?”
That’s when I knew he was thinking about the same person I was. That fight with the tough town gang that was trying to take over the whole boys’ world of the Sugar Creek territory had been our fiercest battle.
The person on all our minds was John Till’s oldest boy, Big Bob, whose little brother, Tom, had been in that battle, too. Tom was the one who had given me a black eye and a bashed nose.
Circus, the acrobat of our gang, had swung himself up and was sitting on the first limb of the Little Jim Tree. He said, “If Old Man Paddler gave us charge of looking after all his property while he was away, maybe we’d better have a look at his cemetery plots and at the tombstones he’s got there, where his wife and two boys are buried.”
It was a good idea, we thought, so we dashed up the long grassy slope to the top. We hadn’t any
sooner climbed through the fence that borders the hill’s rim, than Dragonfly, who was ahead of the rest of us at the time, let out a yell. “Look, everybody! Somebody’s pushed over Sarah Paddler’s tombstone!”
Never in my whole life had there been a feeling in my heart like what shot through me right then. It was one of the worst things I’d ever experienced. There just never was a kinder old man than Seneth Paddler, and nobody in the whole world ever had a heart that was so full of love for people, especially boys.
So it seemed I was almost as sad as if I were attending his funeral when we reached the place under the tree where, in the dappled sunlight that filtered through the branches overhead, I saw the big, tall tombstone with the name Sarah Paddler on it lying flat on the ground. Beside it was the stone that had the old man’s name on it. His gravestone also had on it the date he was born. The date of his death would have to be put on some other time after the old man himself went to heaven.
Little Jim whispered in my ear in an awed voice, “Look at the hand with the finger pointing!” The carved hand with one finger pointing upward was one of the things a boy remembered. I’d seen it hundreds of times, maybe, when the stone stood straight up. The words chiseled where the wrist would have been, if there had been a wrist, said “There is rest in heaven.” And there is for anybody who, as our Sugar Creek minister says, “trusts for his soul’s salvation in the Savior and not in himself or in how good he is—or thinks he is.”
Big Jim let out a groan and shook his head as if he just couldn’t believe it. The grass all around the place was mashed down, and an urn that had been there with flowers growing in it was also turned over. The dirt and flowers were spilled out and scattered, and the red roses were wilted and looked like dried blood on the ground.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 31-36 Page 10