Circus quickly stooped and scooped the bills up. “Hey!” he exclaimed. “How come there are seven?”
“Yeah, how come?” Poetry panted, still short of breath from his scuffle with Dragonfly. “He was going to pay us a dollar apiece, and there are only six of us!”
We found out how come when we read the letter. Just to be unselfish, I did let Big Jim read it—he was our leader and had ordered me to, anyway. This is what, from the old man’s careful, trembly scrawl, Big Jim read:
Dear Boys:
You’ve made me very proud of you, the way you have looked after my place. When I read in the Sugar Creek Times how you not only helped capture the vandals but turned over your reward money to the Till family for Mrs. Till’s hospital expenses, I realized how unselfish you really are.
I notice that one of the vandals is named Lawrence Bowen. That is the same name as a great-grandnephew of Old Tom the Trapper. Old Tom, you know, used to live in the stone house you boys call the haunted house. Whenever you happen to think of it, just send up a silent prayer for Lawrence.
Big Jim stopped reading for a few seconds. I noticed he had a faraway look in his eyes, which meant that maybe right that very minute he was doing what Old Man Paddler had suggested. It wasn’t exactly easy for me to do it, because my mind was hot again over what the boys had done to the old man’s place and what they had done to the Sugar Creek Gang itself—chopping a hole in our fishing boat, filling our spring reservoir with marsh mud. They’d even upset Old Man Paddler’s wife’s tombstone in the cemetery at the top of Bumblebee Hill.
While I was doing what Big Jim was maybe doing, I was also remembering something the old man had said to us quite a few times, “Boys don’t need to be punished so much as they need to be changed.” This, of course, made good sense, and I knew who could change them.
Pretty soon Big Jim’s mind came back to the letter, and he read on.
Because I have decided to stay out here two more weeks and enjoy the good fishing in the Pacific—caught seventeen mackerel and three bonitos yesterday from the barge five miles offshore—I’m sending your pay in advance. There’ll be another dollar apiece when I get back. The seventh dollar in today’s letter is to be used for having a new key made for the cabin’s front door. I accidentally dropped mine overboard yesterday, and it is somewhere down in Davey Jones’s locker at the bottom of the ocean. Use the key you have for a model, and hang the new one with the cave key you know where, so if I happen to come home in the middle of the night, I won’t have to waken anybody to get into my house.
The old man signed his letter the way he always did, using only the initials “O.M.P.”—which, as most anybody knows, means “Old Man Paddler.”
Big Jim finished reading and was folding the letter when Dragonfly said, “There’s something on the back side!”
There was, and when we’d turned it over, our twelve eyes began to read, “You boys are always interested in mysteries, so here is a new one for you. I had planned it for my return but now that I’m staying two more weeks, you may as well have it now.” Then he wrote:
A bright young boy, smart as a fox
Studied a code and found a tin box,
And in the tin box, a treasure so rare,
Nor silver nor gold with its worth could compare.
Below the little four-line poem were three rows of letters. Just in case anybody reading this would like to get in on our secret, here is the code itself just as he printed it:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Z Y X W V U T S R Q P O N M L K J I H G F E D C B A
H Z D W F H G D L L W H S V W
“That doesn’t make good sense,” Dragonfly complained, proving he still didn’t have a thought in his empty head.
“Sleepy Hollow,” Poetry reminded him, and for a few seconds it looked as if there might be another scuffle.
Then Little Jim came up with an idea. “The first row of letters is the ABCs forward, and the second row is the ABCs backward. Anybody want to hear me say ’em backward?”
With that, he started in saying the ABCs backward without looking at the old man’s letter. He’d got as far as N M L K J, when Circus, who has six sisters and had to be smart just to stay alive, interrupted to suggest, “Maybe the first two lines of the letters are the code’s lock, and the last line is the key. Fit the key into the lock, and you have the answer.”
Well, for about thirty seconds—or maybe three or four minutes—we used our wits to see if we could figure out what the smart boy in the poem had already figured out so that he could find the treasure in a tin box. Then we gave up.
I wasn’t interested right then in having another adventure of the mind, anyway, having had several already that day. An adventure of the muscles seemed more important. So as soon as we had all given up, I shoved the letter into my shirt pocket, and we decided we should go out into the barnyard and get our ball game started before anybody’s noise could wake anybody up.
I went into the house to get my softball bat, and, while I was there, I sneaked a peek to see if Charlotte Ann was still asleep. She still was, but she had turned over, and her freckle-faced doll had probably turned over with her, because it was now upside down. Glad that she was still sleeping, I sneaked away and was quickly out with the gang again.
We had a fast meeting by the iron pitcher pump a few feet from the small water puddle the butterflies were making a white-and-yellow border around. We voted that I was to write a letter and send it airmail to thank the kind, long-whiskered old man for the seven pictures of George Washington on the seven one-dollar bills and to tell him we’d use one of the dollars to pay to have a new cabin door key made for him and hide it in the secret place you know where.
That being decided, we broke up our meeting and right away were in the middle of an exciting ball game, having as much fun as six boys could have when they didn’t dare let out a single excited yell on account of they didn’t want a chubby little girl to wake up and come toddling out to upset everything.
Pretty soon, though, the fun was interrupted. Circus threw a fast ball to me while I was at bat. I saw it coming straight as an ivory-white bullet. My muscles tightened. I swung back and let go with a fierce, fast savage wham that hit the ball square on the nose.
Well, that new softball shot off my bat like a rocket off a launching pad. It sailed up into the barnyard sky, over the top of the chicken house, and, like the arrow in Longfellow’s poem, “it fell to earth I knew not where.”
“Home run!” I yelled. Because I knew it’d take quite a while for anybody to field the ball and get it back onto our barnyard diamond, I made it a home walk instead of a home run, strutting proudly all the way around the tin-can bases.
And then is when our fun got interrupted. Poetry, who had puffed his way around behind the chicken house to look for the ball, yelled over the roof to us, “Your ball’s out here in the bee yard, and the bees are as mad as hornets!”
Dragonfly called back to Poetry, “Bill’ll come and get it in a minute!”
But just because I was the son of an expert bee handler did not mean I was going to risk my allergies in an apiary where a thousand bees were already stinging mad at each other. I said so to the gang, but Dragonfly lowered his eyebrows at me and shot back, “It’s my new ball, and you’re the one that knocked the home run!”
“Come on and see for yourself why I can’t go in to get it,” I said to the gang.
Pretty soon we had worked our way around to the board fence with the wild grapevines sprawled all over it. Then we were peeking over and through the leaves at the hives and the hot-tempered bees and also at the ivory-white softball lying in the grass not more than thirty inches from the very hive where this morning I’d seen dozens of wounded and dead bees piled all around the entrance. It was still like that, only a lot worse, with the dead and dying everywhere. You could also smell the odor of bee venom hanging in the air like the smell of smoke on a damp day.
“
Smell that bee venom?” I said to everybody. “There’s a bee battle on. A robber swarm is stealing honey, and they’re all stinging each other. They smell the poison from their own stings, and that makes them still madder. It’s like committing suicide to go in there to try to get that ball! Besides, I had onions for lunch, and I’m sweating all over from playing so hard!”
“What’s that got to do with it?” Dragonfly, still the spokesman, demanded.
“Plenty,” I said back. “Different smells such as onion breath, perfume, or body sweat make a mad bee still madder. Look out! Duck! They’ve located us!”
Two or three of them had, anyway. We dropped to the ground like six dead ducks and waited till the angry bees left us. Then we crawled back to our barnyard baseball diamond again.
“They’ll be calmed down by tonight,” I said. “I’ll sneak in and get the ball while they sleep.”
But Dragonfly wouldn’t give up. “I don’t want a thousand bees swarming all over and stinging my ball!” he fussed. Then without anybody even calling a meeting, he cried, “It’s been moved and seconded that Bill put on his father’s bee veil and go in and get my ball! All in favor say aye.”
For some reason, I was the only one to vote no. I tried to be funny by saying, “Five of the eyes see it but one is already swollen shut.”
“Chicken!” Poetry, my next-to-best friend up to now, said to me.
“Yeah, chicken!” Dragonfly copycatted him, and Circus, who sometimes has better judgment than the rest, looked at me with accusing eyes. Even Big Jim’s grin told me he thought I wasn’t brave enough to go and get an innocent ball.
Now, as any boy knows, nobody likes to be called “chicken,” which means whoever calls him that thinks he’s a scaredy-cat.
But I happened to remember some sharp advice from my father when he had said to me, “Son, no boy likes to be thought a coward, but it’s better to have good sense than it is to be brave. Better to be thought a fool than it is to be one.”
Only Little Jim seemed to be on my side. He piped up to say, “With so many bees on the ground all around the ball, Bill might step on some of them—and who wants to smash a helpless honeybee?”
“Yeah,” I agreed, grabbing onto his idea. “Who does? Dad is very particular about what happens to any of his bees!”
Then I thought to say, “Listen, you guys. Did anybody hear Charlotte Ann crying or calling or fussing or anything?”
But nobody had.
And right then something happened that made me realize how stubborn our crooked-nosed, spindle-legged gang member really was.
“All right,” Dragonfly said with a set jaw, “if you’re going to be chicken, I know a boy who’s not chicken!”
With that, that little set-willed rascal of a pop-eyed boy swung around and started on the run for our toolshed, letting fly back over his thin shoulder, “If your father can do it, I can do it!”
I knew what he now had on his one-track mind. He was going to get Dad’s bee veil and go into a lions’ den of seventeen thousand angry bees, and that was about the most foolish thing a boy could ever do! Of all people in the world, a boy who never knew when he was going to get an asthma attack ought not to let himself get stung maybe seventeen times. He might be even more allergic to bee venom than I was.
I was off and after him in seconds, catching up with him just as he was yanking open the toolshed door.
“Look!” I said to him. “You’d be absolutely crazy to go out there now!”
He wormed out of my grasp and made a dive for Dad’s hat with the long veil on it, just as I made a dive for him, caught him behind by the belt of his jeans, and pulled him back.
We scuffled a minute—a half minute, anyway—and what might have happened next is anybody’s guess, but all of a sudden the little guy began to cry. “I’ve got to get it back! My father’ll clobber me if don’t!”
Well, to make this part of the story shorter, this is what I found out in the next few minutes as Dragonfly and I stood outside the toolshed door.
“I’m being punished for something I did yesterday,” he confessed. “My parents told me I couldn’t play with my new ball for two days, and it was on the top of the kitchen cabinet right where I could see it but couldn’t have it. They’ve gone to town to get groceries, and they’ll be home by four o’clock, and if the ball’s not up there, I’ll get the daylights whammed out of me!”
I knew that Dragonfly’s father had an extra-hot temper, and he did punish extrahard. I knew too that Dragonfly’s mind had ordered him to do something wrong. But it just didn’t seem right, my mind thought, for a member of our own gang to get the daylights punished out of him, as I’d seen happen to him several times before.
Well, my wristwatch told me it was already almost three o’clock. If we wanted to help Dragonfly out of his trouble, we’d have to get the ball in a hurry. And I knew then what I was going to have to do—get on Dad’s bee veil, which I’d never worn in my life, put on his gloves, and risk getting stung maybe seventeen times. I, Bill Collins, son of an expert bee handler, who was scared of even ordinary bees around a hive, was going to have to forget about its being better to have good sense than it is to be brave.
I was surprised at how well I could see through the netting when I had Dad’s hat and bee veil on. It was sort of like looking through the lace curtains at our living room window. The ends of the long veil were tucked into the collar of my leather jacket. I usually wore the jacket only in the winter, but I knew the bees couldn’t sting through it.
A few seconds later, I said, “Well, here goes nothing!”
My voice sounded brave, but I was trembling inside and maybe as afraid as I’d ever been in my half-long life. I was remembering the time I’d been stung five times all at once and had not only gotten sick to my stomach but had almost fainted. Of course, a thing like that couldn’t happen to anybody who had his veil and bee gloves on. Or could it?
I sneaked around to the apiary gate, pushed it open, and also left it open, just in case I might have to come rushing out in a hurry.
Through the veil I could see the five heads of five boys peering over and through the leaves of the wild grapevine that smothered the board fence. I worked my way along on hands and knees for a while, until I happened to think there might be a dead or a dying or a very much-alive bee in the grass from the fierce, fast-buzzing bee battle they were having.
The closer I got to the hives where the battle was, the more I smelled the bee venom, and the more I realized it would never have done for Dragonfly to do what I was doing.
Now I could see the ball, half hidden in the tallish bluegrass. If I could get safely to within a few feet of it, I’d make a wild dive, scoop it up in one of my gloved hands, toss it over the board fence, and run like Peter Rabbit with Mr. McGregor after him straight for the open gate. Then I’d lose myself among the long, hanging-down branches of the trees in the orchard.
The buzzing was so loud I could hardly hear myself think. I crept nearer, hoping the bees wouldn’t smell my onion breath or the perspiration I’d been perspiring in the ball game.
What an angry buzzing!
And then, just as I was getting close and had the ball in plain sight, I heard something else.
It was a sound that sent shivers up and down my spine and all over me. Then I was seeing as well as hearing, and what I saw was Charlotte Ann Collins, toddling happily along with her big freckle-faced doll in her arms and coming straight through the wide-open bee yard gate to be where her brother was—and having no sense at all of the danger she was in.
Well, as you maybe remember, there is a line in a certain poem that says, “I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me.”
My shadow right that minute had followed me in, and she was going to have to get out in a hurry, with or without me!
In my mind’s eye I saw a whole lot more than I saw through the bee veil. I saw that little rascal of a kid sister wake up in her bed and, hearing all the noise we had been
making, decide she wanted to be where we all were. That’s what a toddler her age likes to do more than anything else anyway, like a little monkey doing the same things it sees others do.
And now here she was, walking innocently toward the hot center of the battle in the bee yard.
What on earth! my worried mind exclaimed to me.
“Get back!” I yelled. “You’ll get the living daylights stung out of you! Back! Don’t come any closer!”
But what do you suppose that little rascal of a brown-haired, pretty-faced, happy-go-lucky dumbbell of a girl kept on doing?
Already inside the bee yard, she kept coming toward me, dragging her doll by one arm now and grinning as if she didn’t have a worry in the world. What was her veiled brother so excited about on such a beautiful sunshiny day?
5
What was I so excited about?
If you have ever been in a situation like the one I was in, you’ll know that I had about seventeen thousand six hundred and forty-three savage little stingers all around me, all of them fighting mad and looking for anything and anybody they didn’t like.
One selfish hive of bees had decided to try to steal honey from their next-door neighbor rather than wear out their wings gathering pollen from one flower after another and carrying it miles and miles home and storing it away. All they had to do, they probably thought—if bees can think—was to sneak into their neighbors’ hives and help themselves.
The only thing was, the neighbors had worked hard for their honey, and they weren’t going to have any thieves break into their hives in broad daylight and rob their honey bank.
And so the battle was on, and those seventeen thousand or so bees were as mad as hornets. Anything or anybody that got in the way was going to get stung.
Three things were in the way right that minute—a new, ivory-white softball that probably smelled as if it had been handled by six boys’ sweaty hands, one boy with a bee veil on, and one chubby-legged, bare-legged, happy-go-lucky, innocent-faced, three-year-old, brown-haired little girl heading straight for the thick of the battle.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 31-36 Page 19