Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 31-36

by Paul Hutchens

  I got as mischievous a grin on my face as I could to show her I wasn’t giving her a calling down, which a boy should never do to his mother for two reasons. The first reason is that a boy’s father nearly always finds out and pretty soon smothers the boy with a beech switch. The second reason is that there is a verse in the Bible that says, “Honor your father and your mother,” and nobody can honor his mother by being smart-alecky with her.

  Anyway, as soon as Mom found out why and what for and for whom and how long, she picked out a pair of jeans and a shirt as nearly like the ones Dragonfly had on as she could find. Since he was only a little smaller than I was, the clothes fit pretty well.

  “Don’t you worry one little bit,” Mom crooned to Dragonfly, who in spite of the hot day was shivering from being so wet. “With this sunshine and wind, your clothes will be dry in a little while. I’ll have them ironed and ready for you by the time you get back.”

  We had to tell her what we were going to do up in the hills and at the haunted house, because I was her boy, and she could always work or rest better if she knew where I was and why.

  Dragonfly went into our toolshed to change clothes, and, while we waited, Mom got an idea. “If you’re going to stop at Mr. Paddler’s cabin, take these cookies along. All the way,” she added with a smile at the gang and an unnecessary look at her only son. “I just baked them yesterday, so they’re nice and fresh.”

  I stared at the frosted cookies, surprised that Mom had baked them yesterday and I hadn’t found out about it until right now. Maybe that’s why there were so many of them left.

  A few seconds later, when Dragonfly came out of the toolshed with a grin on his face, it was as if I was facing a full-length mirror and walking slowly toward myself—except that I had on a broad-brimmed Stetson, was wearing a different face and a pair of fancy, high-heeled cowboy boots, and was carrying a coil of rope. I was also limping a little.

  The rope was one I myself had bought out of my allowance a few days before. I had been practicing lassoing different things around the farm.

  Dragonfly let out a whoop, swung the rope in a wide circle, and let it fly through the air with the greatest of ease. Its noose settled around the iron pitcher pump. He seemed to want to take the rope along with us, so—since I was trying to get all the way over being jealous of him because of his boots and Stetson—I let him.

  I noticed the little guy wince when he limped over to slip the noose off the pump. I remembered the blister on his heel and asked him, “Feet hurt? Your boots too tight, maybe?”

  He right away stopped limping and shook his head as much as to say that, even if his foot did hurt, it didn’t hurt enough to admit it—not when he was so proud of his new, high-heeled, tooled-leather boots.

  I liked the little guy for being brave, but I was remembering one of Dad’s favorite quotes, “It’s better to have good sense than it is to be brave.”

  If Dragonfly didn’t have good sense for himself, somebody ought to have it for him, I thought. And that’s why, just before we left, I went into the house to the drawer where we kept our first-aid kit and took out a small roll of gauze, some tape, and a few Band-Aids. I shoved them into one of my overall pockets. If I couldn’t talk any good sense into Dragonfly’s stubborn head, maybe the too-tight leather boot could—especially since it would be hard walking in the hills and it was quite a long distance to the haunted house.

  Finally we started. It was a nice day even though it was still very sultry. I couldn’t help but notice there were a few extralarge white clouds like mountain-sized piles of cotton in the southwest sky above the hills in the direction we were going.

  “Look at those thunderheads!” I said to the rest of us. “We’d better get Alexander the Coppersmith dug up and moved. There might be a flash flood even this afternoon!”

  “Good idea,” Big Jim answered, and we all broke into a run—even Dragonfly, who had to in order to keep up.

  It would save us almost a mile to go through the cave to Old Man Paddler’s cabin instead of taking the long way around through the woods by the wagon trail. In a little while we were at the hollow sycamore in which I had gotten stuck one time. You’ve probably read about that in the story Western Adventure. I’d had to stay until way into the night and got scared half to death. Talk about a hair-raising experience! But that’s another story. I have to stay with this one now.

  Soon we were in the cave, working our way along in the light of Big Jim’s flashlight, following the narrow passageway, stooping here, turning right or left here or there, getting a little higher all the time, until pretty soon we were at the wooden door that opens into the old man’s cellar. He had left it unlocked for us.

  The first thing I noticed when we were up the cellar steps and into his kitchen, which was also his living room, was the big map of the world mounted on the wall above his wooden dining table. Sticking in the map in different places were a lot of colored pins—some in Africa, some in India and China and in different other countries.

  Just in case you’ve never been in Old Man Paddler’s cabin, I’d better explain that he called the map his “prayer map.” I’d been in his house quite a few times when he had other company, and he would always tell whoever was there, “It helps me remember to pray for my missionary friends. These different-colored pins show me just where they are and with what mission board. I can send up a prayer for them at any time.”

  The teakettle was singing on the stove, and in an open kettle beside it were chips of sassafras roots boiling. Sassafras tea was what he always made for us when we visited him.

  The tea wasn’t quite ready, so we looked around to see if there were any chores we could do for him, such as carrying in more firewood, sweeping the pine needles from his porch, or carrying a pail of fresh water from his spring. Little Jim, who, as you maybe know, was more interested in music than any of the rest of us, asked if we could play the old man’s musical photograph album.

  Old Man Paddler had quite a few of what Mom called antiques, such as a little hand sewing machine, an inkstand with two crystal ink bottles with caps, and a pen rack formed by deer antlers. In the loft upstairs was a hardwood swing cradle with casters so it could be rolled away, and it had very fancy ornamental carving on it. The cradle didn’t tip or roll, and when you made it swing, it didn’t make any noise.

  But the antique we all liked best was the musical photograph album. It was worth going all the way up to his cabin just to see it and listen to it.

  “Surely you can,” the old man answered Little Jim. “You know where it is.”

  I followed Little Jim around behind the stairway and stood beside him, while I watched him get it. I was thinking that long, long, long ago must have been a very interesting time to live. The album was about a foot long and maybe nine or ten inches wide and five inches high.

  Old Mr. Paddler called to us then, saying, “Bring it in here, will you? I want to tell you something special about it, now that you’re going to play it.”

  We carried it carefully and set it on the kitchen table. In the light from the window it was certainly pretty. Its front had artificial flowers on what looked like transparent celluloid. There were red roses in the middle and violets on the side all around. It was also bordered with gold. The album part had a lot of storage places the old man called “cabinets,” and in them were pictures of Sarah Paddler, his wife, now in heaven, and his two boys, also in heaven, whose bodies are buried in the cemetery on Bumblebee Hill. There were also pictures of other people who used to live a long time ago around Sugar Creek.

  “Here, boys, is what I want you to see.” He turned the pages of the album with his gnarled old fingers until he came to the picture of a man with a long beard, hair that reached to his shoulders, and sad—very sad—eyes. “This, boys, is Old Tom the Trapper.”

  We were in a little huddle around the table, all of us looking at the tintype of Tom the Trapper, which, of course we’d all seen before maybe a hundred times. My own thoughts
were kind of sad as I was reminded of what we’d come to do—exhume the body of Alexander the Coppersmith and rebury it under the big sugar maple tree near the house where Old Tom used to live. It was also where the old trapper himself was buried.

  Maybe a hundred times, as I said, we had visited Old Man Paddler, and almost that many times he had told us Old Tom’s sad story—how he’d been shot by an Indian arrow. We had acted out the story in a make-believe game many a time.

  I always got to play Old Tom and get shot. Then, because I was too heavy to be carried, I would walk all the way to the haunted house with the gang, stretch myself out on the ground under the big tree, and they’d pretend to bury me—sometimes covering me over with autumn leaves and sometimes actually sprinkling dirt in my face, which would always break up the funeral.

  “Old Tom used to have an album exactly like this,” Old Man Paddler said. He stopped to turn to his stove and take off the kettle of sassafras roots, which were boiling too hard and might boil over.

  “My twin brother, Kenneth, and I liked it so well that we used to go over to see him and ask him to let us play it. One Christmas we found a big brown package on our doorstep, and there it was. We thought at first he had given us his, but he hadn’t. He’d bought us one just like it.

  “Tom would be pleased if he knew what you boys are going to do today,” the quavering voice of the old man went on as he poured our six cups of red sassafras tea. “He was a great lover of dogs.”

  It seemed nice to sit there in the friendly cabin and dream of the long-ago days, though we knew we’d better hurry to get done what we had to do. The musical album had a Swiss music box in it, and the music certainly was sweet. It could play three different tunes. Anybody who has ever heard a Swiss music box knows what they sound like. The air I liked best was the one we all knew by the name of “Silent Night,” which nearly everybody in the world knows. It was playing right that second while we finished our tea.

  Old Tom’s story was different from any we’d ever heard. He wasn’t the only living thing the Indians killed that long-ago year. Tom had wakened one morning to start on his trapline and had found both his Dalmatian dogs lying dead, killed by War Face’s arrows.

  “Terry and Jerry were the most beautiful dogs my brother and I ever saw,” we’d heard Old Man Paddler say many times. I could repeat almost word for word that part of the story.

  “Old Tom never married and for a long time hadn’t had a living relative, so he kept himself from getting lonesome by always having a dog or two around the place.

  “The two dogs I remember best were his Dalmatian twins, Jerry and Terry. It was a happy sight to see him strolling through the woods, playing his mouth organ and with those frisky, happy dogs galloping all around him, running on ahead, stopping to look back and up at him to see where he was going or if he was following.

  “Old Tom was never quite the same after they were killed. He buried them close to the house under the sugar maple tree and put up twin markers for them. I think maybe that’s why, when Kenneth and I found him with the arrow in his chest and he knew he was mortally wounded, his dying request was that he be buried under the big tree, too.”

  Old Tom had died before he could finish what he wanted to say. But the Paddler twins had heard his last few gasping words. “You boys—don’t forget to serve God all your lives.”

  There were a few other words, which they couldn’t hear, but they heard the word “saved” and something about music.

  “I think Tom was trying to quote a Bible verse,” Old Man Paddler told us. He quoted for us the verse he thought it was: “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved.”

  I’d learned that verse in the Sugar Creek Sunday school when I was little. It seemed a whole lot more important now that we knew it was the last thing Old Tom the Trapper had thought just before he died.

  As soon as we finished our sassafras tea and a frosted cookie apiece, the kind old man yawned and said, “You’ll find my spade and shovel out in the toolshed. If I’m asleep when you bring them back, just clean them good and stand them behind the apple barrel. Help yourself to an apple apiece while you’re there—before you go, I mean, and after you get back too.” His voice was half-smothered in a sleepy yawn.

  Little Jim piped up then. “What became of Old Tom’s album when he died?”

  For a minute Old Man Paddler got a faraway look in his eyes as if he was remembering something or else had just forgotten something. Then he said, “It was never found. His house had been broken into that same day and a lot of provisions taken. Kenneth and I always supposed maybe War Face or some of his renegade Indians took it. The kind old trapper died intestate too and—”

  “What’s that? What’s intestate?” Little Jim cut in to ask.

  I’d never heard the word before myself. The answer surprised me.

  “It means he died without making a will saying who should get his things. They never found one, anyway.” Old Man Paddler yawned again kind of noisily, which was the same as saying we could hurry along now if we wanted to, because he wanted to take his afternoon nap.

  We soon had the spade and shovel and our apple apiece and were on our way. We were as far as the spring where the old man gets his drinking water when he called to us.

  His high-pitched, quavering voice stopped us all in our tracks. “You know the spot where Tom’s grave is, boys, and Terry and Jerry are in the southeast corner of the little enclosure-just in case you may have forgotten. You might want to put Alexander in the southwest corner under the elderberry bush!”

  He was standing in the doorway of his cabin, holding open the screen. I guess I never did see him standing like that without thinking how much he looked like one of the pictures of Moses I have in my Child’s Story Bible. His hair was as white as snow, and his long flowing beard covered his chin and chest all the way to his belt.

  We thanked him, told him we’d do what he suggested, and again were on our way, hurrying along because it had begun to look more like rain.

  We tried to act happier than we were and laughed and joked a little, but all the time I was thinking how my cousin Wally’s city-bred dog had given his life to save Little Jim.

  That set my mind to daydreaming again. In my imagination I was up in the hills watching the fierce mother wildcat make a savage-tempered, spread-clawed leap for Little Jim’s throat. Then I saw Alexander the Coppersmith meet her in midair, head and teeth first. I watched their fierce fight there on the high ledge. Finally both the wildcat and Alexander fell over the edge of the cliff to the rocks below.

  And suddenly I was back in history more than nineteen hundred years, looking up at three crosses on a hill. And the Person on the middle cross was the Savior, dying for the sins of all the people of all the world, to save everybody who wants to be free from sin.

  My thoughts were interrupted right then by Poetry. He and I were behind the rest of the gang. “Psst! Bill! Stop a minute. I want to show you something!” His tone of voice had an exclamation point in it that seemed to say, as it often does when he stops me like that, “I’ve just thought of something very important!”

  “What?” I answered, stopping and standing stock-still.

  “Remember what Old Man Paddler said? How we ought to clean his tools good before we put them away?”

  “Sure,” I answered. “What of it?” My father had taught me to do that, too. We never put away a spade or a shovel or a hoe or any other farm tool without first being sure it was clean.

  “Just this,” he said. “See this shovel? The last person who used it put it away without cleaning it.”

  I was studying the dirty shovel and was about to say, “Maybe the old man forgot,” when Poetry suggested, “Wasn’t the toolshed door unlocked? Couldn’t anybody have sneaked in day or night, borrowed a shovel, and used it and put it back without the old man hearing him? He’s hard of hearing, anyway.”

  “Sure,” I said, “but—”

  “And couldn’t whoever used it have
been digging somewhere, burying treasure or stolen money or something?”

  Now he was getting, or trying to get, a mystery started in my mind. He had a mind like a detective’s anyway. But this wasn’t any time to be thinking things like that. We had to dig up a dog’s body from a canyon floor and bury it in a dog cemetery under the sugar maple tree near the haunted house.

  “Furthermore,” Poetry said, with a frown on his forehead, “this yellowish clay on the shovel is not the kind of soil in Old Man Paddler’s garden. His is black.”

  He was right, of course, but so what? “He could have been digging sassafras roots with it down along the creek or near the swamp.”

  Poetry scoffed at the idea. “This clay is the kind that is deep—way down deep. Why would he want to dig so deep? And why would a man who can’t stand to put his tools away without cleaning them not clean his shovel?”

  “Because maybe he’s getting old and forgetful,” I suggested.

  But Poetry rejected my idea and held onto his.

  3

  All the rest of the way to Alexander the Coppersmith’s grave in the canyon, I kept thinking about what Poetry had called to my attention. It wasn’t very likely Old Man Paddler had put away his shovel without first cleaning it. And it did seem strange that the dirt on it was a yellowish clay, not the kind of soil in the old man’s garden. Not unless he had been digging a lot deeper than would be necessary.

  Well, coming to Alexander’s grave was almost as sad a time as a funeral in the Sugar Creek Church. After about a fifteen-minute hike, we came to the place where the big old ponderosa had been blown over in a storm and formed a natural bridge across the canyon.

  For a few seconds I was remembering that fierce fight Alexander had had with the wildcat on the ledge on the other side. Then I looked down to the bottom of the canyon to where the fight had ended, where Wally’s mongrel and the killer wildcat had landed with the dog’s teeth sunk into the wildcat’s throat, and where they both had died.