Bob, still not being allowed to sit up, all of a sudden asked, “Where’s my mother? What happened? Where’s the—”
I knew he was now remembering the fight he had been in and the vandal who had gotten away. His face was still pasty white, but there was a touch of color beginning to show in his cheeks, and I was glad. I tell you, glad!
But life had to go on. The ambulance would have to go on to Bob’s house, and we all would start in living again where we’d left off. Everything had happened so fast that it seemed only half an hour had gone by. What an afternoon it had been, and it wasn’t over yet!
Just then, from across the creek and the woods, there came the startling wail of a police siren, and almost before I could turn around to look, there the patrol car was, away up on the north road and headed for the bridge.
I tell you there was excitement for a while, although it wasn’t the kind of nervous excitement we’d been having, because Charlotte Ann was all right, Bob Till’s life had been saved, and the terrible ache in my heart was gone.
It took two policemen from the patrol car only a few seconds to get across the bridge and down the embankment and the hundred yards up the shore to where we all were. Bob Till, still not feeling full of pep, was coughing a little now on account of the water he’d had in his stomach and lungs.
Then Dragonfly spotted something on the ground at the edge of the creek. He made a dive for it, scooped it up, and shoved it into his jeans pocket. His movements were so fast that I didn’t get to see what it was, and I supposed it maybe didn’t matter anyway.
But it did matter. We found that out when the police began asking a lot of questions.
They searched all over the place for any clues that might help them identify the runaway vandal when and if they captured him. “Any of you boys find anything here that’ll help us?” they asked, and not a one of us said we had.
“I’ll know him if I see him again!” Bob Till, still pale and weak, said.
Several of the rest of us said the same thing.
Dragonfly made me angry when he said, “Who gets the reward money if we identify him?”
“Honestly!” Poetry squawked and scowled fiercely at our pop-eyed gang member.
I hadn’t planned to do what I did right then. But quicker than a chick’s chirp, I swung around toward that greedy rascal, shoved my hand into his jeans pocket, and pulled out—of all things in the world—a piece of wet gray cloth about four inches square.
Well, that little crooked-nosed guy flew into a temper tantrum and struggled all around me, trying to get it back.
Holding Dragonfly at arms’ length, I held out the piece of gray cloth and said to the police, “Here’s the only clue we’ve found so far.”
Bob Till’s eyes focused on the piece of cloth while the officer studied it. “That,” Bob said, “is his shirt pocket. I felt it come off in my hand while we were still in the water. I must have held onto it without knowing it.”
And that was that. The ambulance drivers took Mrs. Till and Bob to the hospital. The police got going in their search for the missing vandal, whose partner we’d already caught and tied up there by the bridge. And a tow truck was called to come and pull the Collins family car backward out of the ditch, where its front bumper rested against the bridge abutment.
What a lot of excitement there had been! More in the last few days than a boy could expect to have in one whole summer or even in a year! It was hard to believe it had all happened to us, and right in our own neighborhood.
I was chewing it all over in my mind one day about a week later, while I was out in the garden with the Golden Bantam sweet corn, the black-seeded Simpson lettuce, and the Ebenezer onions.
My father, who had been standing near the iron pitcher pump where our car was parked, admiring his new paint job on the second right front fender we had had put on that summer, took a final look at it and came out to the garden gate. There he raised his right arm to wipe the sweat from his forehead, using his shirt sleeve to do it because he had a paint spray gun in one hand and paint spatters on the other. Also, that shirt sleeve was about the only place left on everything he was wearing that didn’t have paint on it.
I was feeling especially fine. Today was the day Bob Till’s mother was coming home from the hospital. She’d had her operation the same day the ambulance took her and was making what they called a “good recovery.”
“Son?” my father said to me with a question mark on the end of his voice.
“Yes sir?” I answered him with a question mark on mine.
“The boys of the Sugar Creek Gang are growing up. Do you know that?”
I stopped my hand plow and straightened to my full height. Dad’s tone of voice made me feel four or five inches taller. My own voice sounded like a young rooster learning to crow as I answered, “Do we have to? Can’t we just keep on being boys?”
For some reason, as much as I wanted to be older and bigger, the idea of growing up seemed like saying good-bye to the very wonderful boys’ world I’d been living in. It might even mean the scattering of the Sugar Creek Gang, which would be about the worst thing that could ever happen to me.
“You have to, and you can’t,” Dad answered. Then he explained. “Part of growing up is learning to do things for others, sacrificing for somebody else. All the rest of your lives, you boys will be proud of yourselves—in the right way, I mean—for refusing the hundred-dollar reward for the capture of those vandals. Your turning it over to Bob for his mother’s hospital and doctor expenses was one of the most unselfish things you could ever have done.”
“But we didn’t deserve the money,” I said. “Only half of it. We caught only one of them. And even if Bob didn’t capture the other one but the police did, the pocket he tore off the other boy’s shirt in the fight was lying right there beside him when he came to after almost drowning. The reward was for evidence leading to the capture of the vandals—and that shirt pocket was part of the evidence.”
That was another thing I had been chewing over in my mind— how even that little torn-off shirt pocket had had a share in helping the police. When they had captured a scared teenager over on the other side of Wolf Creek not far from the church, he had had a missing shirt pocket.
Dad answered me with what at first sounded like a riddle. He said with a grin in his voice, “It looks like the worm has turned at Sugar Creek.”
“Worm?” I took a quick look down at where I had been cultivating to see if any big fat fish worm down there might be twisting and turning as a fish worm does when it gets plowed up. But there wasn’t a single worm in sight.
“I mean,” Dad explained, “that Bob Till used to be your enemy. Now, all of a sudden he is your friend. It’s just an expression,” he added. “People say that when a situation is reversed. But how,” he went on to ask, “can you boys get along without having somebody to stir up trouble for you now and then?”
“Oh, we’ll manage. We still have Shorty Long,” I said, remembering the new boy who a while back had moved into the neighborhood and upset the peace and quiet of the whole territory with the kind of trouble most everybody knows about in the exciting story called The Blue Cow. “He’s on his vacation now, but he’ll be back next week sometime.”
But Dad was right. The worm had turned at Sugar Creek. We probably never again would have any trouble with Big Bob Till.
“One thing I’d like to know,” I called from the other end of an onion row, “is what you and Mom are going to do about whether to spank or not to spank.”
There was a twinkle in Dad’s eyes as he growled out his answer from under his reddish brown mustache, “Oh—that! We’re going to do it your mother’s way when I’m away from home, and my way when I’m here!”
“Don’t I get to have anything to say about which way?” I asked. There was such a good feeling between us at the time that it seemed all right to ask the question.
Dad’s answer was a little puzzling. “Your way, of course, is just to take i
t whichever way it happens to be given. You understand, don’t you, why your mother can’t punish you corporally?”
“Corporally?” I had never before heard the word used in our family.
Dad waved his spray gun, pressed the trigger, and a foggy stream of green paint came out its nozzle. Then he explained, “Your mother has a very tender heart, Son. She just can’t stand to hurt you bodily. That’s what ‘corporally’ means—‘bodily’”
“Is a boy’s stomach part of his body?” I asked with a grin in my voice, thinking I had just thought of a good joke and could hardly wait for Dad’s yes answer.
When he said a stomach was, I asked, “Then, when a boy gets hunger pangs from missing out on a piece of custard pie, couldn’t you call that corporal punishment?”
Dad grinned as if the joke was only partly humorous, but he winked at me as he said, “We could call it that, but … well … suppose we don’t.”
“Also,” I went on, now a little more seriously, “what could be harder on a boy’s legs and arms, which are part of his body, than to wear out their muscles pushing a cultivator on a sultry afternoon?”
“One thing is for sure,” Dad changed his tone of voice to say, “your mother’s punishment was the right kind for you last week while I was away.” He came through the gate then, set his spray gun on the flat top of one of the gateposts, wiped his hands on a piece of a boy’s worn-out shirt he had pulled from one of his pockets, picked up a hoe, and began to chop away at some small pigweeds growing in the now almost knee-high Golden Bantam.
“It took quite a lot of valuable fishing time,” I disagreed in a friendly voice, pushing my plow along in the hot sunlight. “And sometimes it’s good for a boy to make up for lost time even if it’s a whole week later,” I finished hopefully.
But Dad wasn’t that kind of hopeful. Here is his explanation as to why my having to work several hours in the garden last week was better punishment than the beech switch kind—for that day, anyway.
“In the first place, it took a lot longer,” he said. “Which meant you got a lot of garden work done. In the second place, it kept you here long enough so you could answer the phone when Leslie called from Old Man Paddler’s. And it all worked out for the very best to help you capture the vandals and even to save Bob’s life. Everything would have worked out in a different way if you’d been given what you call your fast, noisy punishment and you’d gone with the gang.”
It made sense. Things had had to be just as they had been.
A question came into my mind then, one I kind of wanted to ask Dad. But even though both of us believed the same way about the Bible, it wasn’t easy to talk to him about it, maybe because he was a lot older. It seemed it was easier to talk to Little Jim about things like that than to anybody else. So I just swallowed my curiosity.
But later that afternoon, after Dad was gone to town and Dragonfly came over to see if I had time to goof around with him a while, I got the answer I wanted. In fact, I answered the question myself.
“It’s this way,” I explained to Dragonfly, “if I hadn’t been home working that afternoon, I’d have missed Poetry’s phone call. If I’d missed it, I wouldn’t have been at the cave when the vandals came charging out and wouldn’t have known which way they went. I wouldn’t have been there to give the sheriff’s deputy the news on the phone and gotten his orders to set up the roadblock. Bob wouldn’t have seen us doing it and come to stop us. He wouldn’t have gotten into the fight with the boy that tried to get away. And we wouldn’t have had the shirt pocket you found as evidence. It’s just like it says in the Bible.”
Then I quoted to Dragonfly, whose folks hadn’t taught him very much about the Bible, a very special verse I had memorized at family devotions: “And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.”
I was still with the Ebenezer onions, and Dragonfly was chopping around a little with the weeding hoe. He raised the hoe high then and brought it down with a savage slice at a weed that was too small for corporal punishment and said, “Weeds don’t work together for good—not that one, anyway.”
“Maybe they do.” I was surprised I was smart enough to say that. “Maybe if there weren’t any weeds at all, we wouldn’t cultivate the garden as much as we should and wouldn’t get as good a crop.”
It seemed we had talked about that long enough, and pretty soon he said, “Bob Till came over to our house this morning, and look what he gave me!”
Dragonfly turned his back and leaned over to show me a brand-new gray patch his mother had sewed on his pants.
“What do you mean, what he gave you?” I asked.
“Shirt pocket,” he said with a grin. “Bob said I could keep it for a souvenir, and Mom made a patch out of it for my pants that got torn when I climbed through the fence to get down to where he was getting worked on.”
The phone in our house rang then, two long longs and a short short, and in a minute Mom was at the back door calling, “It’s your mother, Roy. She wants you to come home and help with the garden work!”
And then I was alone again. My father was away, and I was sweating and grunting along, pushing the cultivator and wishing I could be doing something else. And that’s when it happened again. Right in front of my eyes I turned up with my plow shovel six or seven of the largest, juiciest-looking, wriggling, lively fishing worms anybody ever saw!
I stopped and stood and stared at them while they stretched themselves out and inched their way along, trying to get back into the ground.
Then I said, “Oh, no, you don’t! Maybe if I put you on a hook away down under the water, you’d bring up a sunfish or a bass. But my father, who handles the beech switches, would rather you’d go back down into the ground, eat as much garden soil down there as you can stuff yourselves with, and come back up tonight with what you couldn’t digest and deposit it right here on the surface where the Ebenezer onions can get at it!”
Later that afternoon—in fact, it was getting close to chore time—I went out into the barn and up into the haymow and lay down in the sweet-smelling alfalfa, having ordered myself to take a short rest.
There my eyes roamed around, resting on different things—the long beam I sometimes used for a platform for Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, the wooden box I’d made and placed away up on a mantel-like shelf for pigeons to nest in, the net hanging from the iron hoop we used for basketball practice, and the sparrow’s nest on another log, which I’d have to tear out sometime. Then I closed my eyes to see what, if anything, would flash upon my inner eye.
And do you know what? It wasn’t at all like what somebody named Wordsworth had had flash on his inner eye. It was, instead, a host of Golden Bantam sweet corn with its blades tossing in the breeze, and its husky, rusty rustle was calling me to get up and come and do something about the weeds that were growing between the rows.
The Sugar Creek Gang Series:
1 The Swamp Robber
2 The Killer Bear
3 The Winter Rescue
4 The Lost Campers
5 The Chicago Adventure
6 The Secret Hideout
7 The Mystery Cave
8 Palm Tree Manhunt
9 One Stormy Day
10 The Mystery Thief
11 Teacher Trouble
12 Screams in the Night
13 The Indian Cemetery
14 The Treasure Hunt
15 Thousand Dollar Fish
16 The Haunted House
17 Lost in the Blizzard
18 On the Mexican Border
19 The Green Tent Mystery
20 The Bull Fighter
21 The Timber Wolf
22 Western Adventure
23 The Killer Cat
24 The Colorado Kidnapping
25 The Ghost Dog
26 The White Boat Rescue
27 The Brown Box Mystery
28 The Watermelon Mystery
29 The Trap
line Thief
30 The Blue Cow
31 Treehouse Mystery
32 The Cemetery Vandals
33 The Battle of the Bees
34 Locked in the Attic
35 Runaway Rescue
36 The Case of Missing Calf
Paul Hutchens
MOODY PUBLISHERS
CHICAGO
© 1962, 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.
Original Title: Sleeping Beauty at Sugar Creek
ISBN: 978-0-8024-7036-2
We hope you enjoy this book from Moody Publishers.
Our goal is to provide high-quality, thought-provoking books and products that connect truth to your real needs and challenges. For more information on other books and products written and produced from a biblical perspective, go to www.moodypublishers.com or write to:
Moody Publishers
820 N. LaSalle Boulevard
Chicago, IL 60610
357910864
Printed in the United States of America
PREFACE
Hi—from a member of the Sugar Creek
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.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 31-36 Page 15