Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 31-36

by Paul Hutchens

  In less than half a minute, it seemed, that faster running boy who had just joined our chase caught up with the woodshed boy, tackled him the way Dragonfly had tackled Poetry in the first part of this story, and down they went.

  Down also all the rest of us went in a flurry of sixteen legs, sixteen arms, and eight different-pitched voices, calling and talking excitedly and grunting, while thousands of muscles held on for dear life to whomever our prisoner was.

  We still didn’t know who had joined our chase and outrun us and made the tackle for us—not until Little Jim cried out, “Bob Till! Where’d you come from?”

  And it was Big Bob Till, who used to be the worst enemy the Gang ever had. Like a neighbor’s hound joining in on a coon chase, he had all of a sudden come in from the shadows and given us the help we needed.

  In a little while, all eight of us were inside the cabin, a kerosene lamp was lit, and we were questioning our prisoner, the way police do when they capture somebody. We had tied the boy into a chair so he wouldn’t make a break for liberty and make us have to catch him again.

  Quite a few things were explained. First, the runaway was one of the vandals. Then we found out that Bob Till, who had captured this same boy before, had been listening to a late news program at home when the announcer said one of the vandals had escaped and might be in the Sugar Creek hills.

  “I knew the Gang was spending the night here,” Bob said, “so I decided to come and warn you to be on the lookout.”

  That’s when our prisoner cut in to say, “I didn’t break out. I didn’t run away. Somebody left the door unlocked, and I just walked out! I had a letter from the old man who lives here. He told me I had the same name as a nephew of somebody called Old Tom the Trapper, and I might be Old Tom’s great-grandnephew. He told me to come and see him when I got out. He said he wanted to forgive me for everything, and he had a present for me that used to belong to my uncle—if he was my uncle.”

  And do you know what? I looked across the lamplit space between Lawrence Bowen and me—if that was his name—and saw him swallow hard, as if there was a lump in his throat. And it seemed I wanted to untie the ropes and set him free.

  “You have the letter?” Big Jim asked, and the boy nodded. “In my right hip pocket,” he said.

  It was from Old Man Paddler all right. The handwriting was the same as in the letter we had gotten yesterday morning.

  Part of it was about Old Tom the Trapper, but the part that brought actual tears to my eyes was where Old Man Paddler’s trembling scrawl said:

  I’ll be leaving California before long, and when you get out, I want you to come to see me. I have a very warm feeling in my heart for you because of the kind way your dear old Uncle Tom used to treat me and my brother so many years ago. I know he would want me to love you and forgive you for his sake, just as the heavenly Father is willing to forgive anyone for Jesus’ sake.

  There was more to the letter, but none of it that was any of our business, so we tucked it back in Lawrence Bowen’s right hip pocket. Then we held a meeting to decide what to do.

  It was Bob who came up with the right idea. He said to Lawrence, “You’ll have to give yourself up to the police. I know, because once my father—”

  Bob’s voice choked, and he couldn’t say a word more on account of his throat having tears in it. And I knew why. Before his dad had been saved from being an alcoholic, he’d been in jail quite a few times, and once he had broken out and had to go back and stay another month because of it.

  I saw Big Jim, who used to be Bob’s worst-hated enemy, reach out a hand and touch Bob’s shoulder. And it was just as if that hand had a voice and it was saying, “Don’t worry. We like you, and we like your dad too.”

  “Even though the door was left open,” Big Jim decided for Lawrence Bowen, “you shouldn’t have left. Bob’s right. You’ll have to give yourself up.”

  Lawrence himself spoke up then. “You think the old man will forgive me for prying open his woodshed window and going in to sleep there? When he wasn’t home, I thought maybe he’d be back tomorrow, so I decided to wait. I didn’t break into the cabin!”

  And that explained that. It also reminded Lawrence Bowen of something all of us in our new excitement had forgotten.

  “What about the tin box?” he asked. “The one you dug out of the sawdust?”

  It was like coming back from another world.

  Pretty soon, Big Jim had unfolded the note we’d found in the box, and Little Jim came up with the answer to what “Pr. twenty-two, one” meant. “That’s the first verse of the twenty-second chapter of Proverbs in the Bible,” he said.

  At first I thought I was going to be disappointed because there wasn’t any actual treasure. But after we had untied Lawrence Bowen, he asked to read the verse out of the Bible for us, and I felt as light as a feather inside. Happier, even, than a boy zigzagging along in the center of a whirlwind or skinning the cat on the crossbeam of a grape-arbor trellis.

  Lawrence Bowen surprised me at being able to read so well, and what he read was like a row of Golden Bantam sweet corn rustling in the wind in somebody’s garden. Those words out of the old man’s big family Bible were:

  A good name is to be more desired than great riches, favor is better than silver and gold.

  When I looked at the shining eyes of our just-released prisoner, it seemed I was seeing a lot more than a vandal who could chop a hole in a fishing boat or upset Sarah Paddler’s tombstone. I was seeing a boy who, if he had a chance, could grow up to become a man with as good a name as anybody, and that good name would make him richer than the richest person in the world.

  Bob Till stood up then and said firmly, “I’ll have to be going now.”

  Big Jim answered, getting to his own feet just as Bob reached the cabin door, “Might as well stay all night, now that you’re here.”

  “Can’t,” Bob said back. “Mother would worry—and I promised her.”

  A few seconds later, he was gone, running as fast as he could in the light of his flashlight. When he passed the old man’s spring and swung downhill toward the path that went through the swamp, it seemed I was seeing not a former enemy but a famous hero, riding a white horse and calling out, “Hi yo, Silver!”

  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 Trapline 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

  © 1959, 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 S
cripture 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: Down a Sugar Creek Gang Chimney

  ISBN: 978-0-8024-7039-3

  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:

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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

  The Sugar Creek Gang was having one of the most exciting, adventurous summers ever. When we killed the fierce, savage-tempered, twenty-eight-toothed wildcat, we never dreamed that the very next week we’d have a hair-raising experience in a haunted house.

  It had been quite a while since the gang had visited the haunted house, far up in the hills above Old Man Paddler’s cabin. In fact, we hadn’t visited Old Man Paddler himself for some time. And in a way, that kind, long-whiskered old man was responsible for our running into the brand-new, very dangerous, haunted-house mystery.

  Big Jim, the leader of our gang, had seen the old man that morning and had an important story to tell us when the gang met the afternoon of that ordinary day—ordinary, that is, until we heard what Big Jim had to tell us.

  The part of the story that had to do with me, Bill Collins, started at our house. That’s because it was very important that I get to go to the gang meeting down by the swimming hole, and whether or not I could go depended, as it usually does, on Mom or Dad or both.

  It also depended on me. And on that day I wasn’t very dependable. My parents didn’t think so, anyway. It never feels good to be on the outs with your parents when it’s your own fault, and they seemed to think it was my fault.

  Dragonfly, the crooked-nosed, allergy-pestered member of our gang was going to start on an out-West vacation the very next week to get away from the ragweed pollen, which always gave him hay fever and asthma. His folks had bought him a pair of beautiful cowboy boots and a very fancy broad-brimmed Stetson cowboy hat.

  Now, I had saved money that summer toward a new suit I would need in the fall, but I had decided that I needed a pair of cowboy boots and a cowboy hat worse—a whole lot worse. And I was sure that I needed them right now.

  Both Mom and Dad had said no and meant it the first time. But I wanted that hat and those boots so much that I thought it was worth taking a chance on getting into trouble. That very week I’d said in a tone of voice that my parents called fussy, “Dragonfly’s parents like their son. They want him to look like a Westerner. My parents want me to wear overalls and go barefoot and stay home!”

  I had to miss my supper dessert that day and go to bed without getting to listen to the Lone Ranger program.

  That was pretty hard on me because for a week or more I myself had been the Lone Ranger. I rode my big white stallion, Silver, over our farm and up and down the creek, capturing rustlers, saving stagecoach passengers from getting robbed, bringing law and order to the whole territory, and ordering around my imaginary faithful Indian companion, Tonto, as if he was a real person.

  It seemed that Dragonfly was to blame for my half-mad spell even more than my parents. If he hadn’t been wearing his fancy boots and his swept-brim hat, I wouldn’t have wanted a hat and a pair of boots like them. I was mad at my folks, but I was madder at Dragonfly.

  The weather that day was hot, hot, hot. The sun poured down yellow heat all over everything and everybody, making all our tempers quick, our muscles lazy, and our minds—mine especially—a little more stubborn.

  Every few minutes that sultry morning, a whirlwind would spiral from the direction of the south pasture, sweep across the barnyard, and lose itself in the cornfield. Whenever I could, if the stormy little spiral came anywhere near where I was working—or was supposed to be working—I’d leave whatever I was doing, make a barefoot beeline for it, toss myself into it, and go zigzagging along with it whichever way it went. Sometimes it seemed to go in every direction at the same time.

  One of the most pleasant experiences a boy ever has is to go racing and dodging along, trying to stay in the eye of a whirlwind, enjoying the wind fanning his face. Sometimes I get dust in my eyes and can’t see and have to let the happy little spiral go whirling on without me.

  The gang meeting was supposed to be at half past one that afternoon in the shade of the Snatzerpazooka Tree. That’s the little river birch that grows at the edge of Dragonfly’s father’s cornfield near the sandy beach of our swimming hole. We had named that friendly little river birch Snatzerpazooka right after we’d had a Western-style necktie party there and strung up a ridiculous-looking scarecrow from its overhanging branch to keep the crows from eating up the new shoots of corn. Snatzerpazooka was the name we’d given the scarecrow.

  I was surprised at how easy it was for me to leave our house that afternoon without having to do the dishes. I am maybe one of the best dishwashers and dryers in the whole neighborhood from having had so much experience doing them. Sometimes I even do them without being told to.

  “Run along to your meeting,” Dad ordered me from under his reddish brown mustache. “Your mother and I have some important things to discuss. Things you might not be interested in.” Dad’s right eye winked in Mom’s direction.

  I couldn’t let myself worry about whether or not they really wanted me to stay and help with the dishes and were just pretending they didn’t. It looked like a good time to be excused from the table and get started for the Snatzerpazooka Tree.

  Pretty soon I was just outside the east screen door, going kind of slowly, since it would be easier to be stopped if I wasn’t going so fast.

  “Hi, there!” I said to Mixy, our black-and-white house cat, stooping to give her a few friendly strokes just as I heard Dad say to Mom, “It didn’t work that time.”

  Her answer wasn’t easy to hear, because the radio with the noon news program was on in the living room and my mind was listening to both at the same time.

  The newscaster was racing along about somebody who had escaped from jail somewhere. He was armed and should be considered extremely dangerous. I didn’t pay much attention, because it was the kind of news we were getting used to. Whoever the fugitive from justice was, he wouldn’t be anybody around Sugar Creek. And besides, whoever he was, the jail he had broken out of was probably a long way from here.

  Hearing the news did give me an idea, though. Dad’s order to run along to the meeting was like unlocking the Collins family jail and letting his boy out.

  In a few minutes my bare feet had carried me past the hammock swinging under the plum tree and all the way across the grassy lawn to the high rope
swing under the walnut tree near the front gate and our mailbox.

  It was too early to meet the gang. It was also too hot to run, and I was half angry at my folks for wanting me gone so they could talk about something I wasn’t supposed to hear. Besides, any minute now they might wake up to the fact that their prisoner had escaped, and Dad’s voice would sail out across the yard, lasso me, and drag me back. I might as well hang around a while and wait for his gruff-voiced lariat to come flying through the air with the greatest of ease.

  In a flash I was standing on the board seat of the swing, pumping myself higher and higher before sitting down to “let the old cat die.” That is what a boy does when he quits pumping and lets the swing coast to a stop by itself.

  While I was enjoying the breeze in my face, the flapping of my shirt sleeves, and the rush of wind in my ears, I was quoting to myself a poem we had learned in school. It was by Robert Louis Stevenson, who had also written Treasure Island.

  How do you like to go up in a swing,

  Up in the air so blue?

  Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing

  Ever a child can do!

  I was still letting the old cat die—it was half dead already—and my voice was singsonging along on the second stanza of the poem, when I was interrupted by a long-tailed sneeze not far away.

  I knew whose sneeze it was. There wasn’t another boy in the world that could sneeze like that. Only Dragonfly Roy Gilbert could do it. Anytime, any day, anywhere around Sugar Creek you could expect to hear him let out a long-tailed sneeze with some ridiculous word or half-dozen words mixed up in it. One of his favorite sneezes was “Kersnatzerpazooka!”

  Dragonfly was especially proud of his sneezing, except in hay fever season, when he had to do too much of it. This summer, though, as you already know, he was going to the Rockies to get away from ragweed pollen.

  Maybe I ought to tell you that being interrupted is one of my pet peeves. I don’t like having my thoughts interrupted when I’m in my world of imagination, dreaming about something a boy likes to dream about. In fact, it’s sometimes a lot more fun to dream about doing things than it is to actually do them.