Big Jim and Circus would hold the board in place by pushing hard on the attic end. The board was also long enough for somebody to sit on. In case the opposite end slipped off the brick, maybe they could hold me up the way one end of a teeter-totter holds up the other end when it has enough weight on it.
And now it was time to go. Here, Bill Collins, I gritted my teeth and said to myself, here goes nothing!
Into the chimney I went. First, I lay on my back on the board with my head in the opening and, with the gang helping a little, wormed my way until I was far enough in to sit up. The board under me made a good foundation for my weight. In a minute now, I’d be standing, looking out the top of the chimney. A minute after that I’d be out and onto the roof, and Circus would be on his way up after me.
It was hardly raining now. Even if it had been raining cats and dogs, it wouldn’t have made any difference as far as my soot-covered clothes were concerned. They’d have to be washed anyway, and Mom always liked rainwater for washing.
It was easier than I had expected it would be. Now my head was out, my hands were on either side of the wide chimney top, and my feet were on my end of the teeter-totter. I braced myself to jump. I’d have to jump to get myself high enough to work the rest of myself the rest of the way up and out.
It was wonderful to breathe the fresh air after being in the musty attic. A robin on a branch of the maple tree was announcing that the storm was over. In the distance, lazy thunder was rolling, saying the same thing.
But there was another sound, and it wasn’t being made by anything in nature. I looked in the direction it seemed the sound was coming from, which was toward the creek, and saw a boat with a man in it, rowing. In a few fleeting flashes, he would reach the shore on this side. I was so astonished that I almost forgot where I was.
It’s Crimp the Shrimp! I thought.
The minute the prow of the oldish boat touched shore, the stranger, who seemed in a hurry, was on his feet and out of the boat. He gave it a shove, and it was out in the water and floating downstream. And then he was streaking like a deer for the cellar door of the house. Even as he ran, I saw him look up toward the roof.
I ducked to keep from being seen and whispered down to the gang, “There’s somebody coming! He’s running like a streak of lightning. He—”
That was as far as I got. All of the sudden I felt the bottom drop out. The board had slipped off the brick ledge, and I knew I was going down. I set my arm muscles to hold onto the chimney top with my hands. Maybe my feet could find the brick the board had been resting on.
But I didn’t have a good grip on the extra-wide chimney. Down and down and down and down! I fell past the dark hole we had made, struggling to stop myself by grasping for the rough inside of the chimney, cringing and worrying and wondering what on earth and how soon and would it hurt and how much. I was on my way to the bottom of the soot-blackened, brick-lined chimney!
Well, it was not the night before Christmas, even though we’d had a little Christmas music. And there was a whole lot more than a mouse stirring. The rifleman who had settled his brains for a long afternoon nap would soon hear such a clatter he would wake up and spring from his air mattress to see what was the matter.
Also, out on the lawn making a beeline for the cellar door was an excited man in a hurry to get to the house and in it. And he and I would probably get to the fireplace at the same time.
“Down the chimney St. Nicholas came with a bound.” That is the way a line in the poem goes.
I did manage to land on my feet, which meant that I didn’t get hurt except for what felt like twenty scratches and bruises. But I certainly wasn’t in any mood to “bound” or to call out “Merry Christmas” to anybody. Instead, there was a feeling in my mind that recalled to me the last words Santa Claus was supposed to have yelled after he got back up the chimney and was driving away. They were “Good night!”
Inside the fireplace, I heard the basement door opening and footsteps starting up to the closed trapdoor in the kitchen. I wished I could have been standing on that door and all the gang with me!
But in a minute the trapdoor would be open, the second man would be in the house, and, as Dragonfly had said quite a few times, I’d be in a trap.
My eyes glimpsed the big hall closet near the front door, and I wondered if I would have time to make a dive for it and get into it to hide.
Maybe, I thought, Crimp the Shrimp will be in such a hurry to get upstairs that he’ll swish past the fireplace without looking. I knew the screen standing on the hearth certainly couldn’t keep him from seeing me if he looked in my direction. I decided to risk the hall closet.
I shoved aside the fireplace screen and scrambled out. Then I stumbled over my own feet and managed a head-over-heels fall on the floor in front of the fireplace just in time for the man to trip over me.
I didn’t have any idea how much soot there was in the chimney until I saw how much of it had brushed off on my clothes and hands and face onto the clothes and hands and face of the man I was in a tangled-up scramble with.
Before I could get up from the floor, I felt his arms around me, holding onto me like a boxer holding onto another boxer to keep from getting hit. Scared plenty, I was like a fishing worm trying to keep from being put on a hook, as I squirmed and twisted and panted and grunted and tried to use my fists.
But those arms around me were like the muscles of the village blacksmith under the spreading chestnut tree. They were as strong as iron bands. My own muscles weren’t exactly weak, and my jaw muscles were extrastrong from eleven-almost-twelve years of exercise, and my teeth were good and sharp, which I proved to my assailant without knowing I was going to.
With a yank and a squirm and a couple of twists and a wham-wham-wham with my doubled-up fists, I was free all of a sudden and on my way toward the kitchen and the open trapdoor.
I wasn’t quick enough, though.
Crimp the Shrimp or whoever he was got to the doorway first and blocked it. “You little brat!” he yelled at me. “Where’d you come from, anyway? How’d you get in here?”
I stood gasping, looking at his smudged face and hands and clothes, knowing how they had gotten that way. “I’m Santa Claus,” I answered him, panting. “I just came down the chimney.”
“Oh, you did, did you!” he said. “Well, you listen to me! You’re old enough to know there ain’t no Santa Claus, and in just about two seconds you’ll find out for sure!”
With that, he made a lunge for me, and at the same time I let out a scream for help. Though, with the gang locked in the attic and the rifleman upstairs, how in the world could I expect any help?
“Help! Help! Big Jim! Circus! Everybody! H—e—e—e—e—l—p!”
While I was dodging this way and that like a mouse in a house with a woman with a broom after it, I glimpsed a movement in the fireplace, saw the end of a rope, and felt a spurt of hope. That rope meant Big Jim or Circus had tied one end of the rope around the chimney up there in the attic and had pushed the other end through our newly made hole and dropped it down for me to grab onto. I could pull myself up hand over hand to safety.
Except that it wouldn’t be to safety. That would be going from a new trap back into an old one.
I couldn’t get out the front door because it was locked. I couldn’t get to the kitchen and the trapdoor because the way was blocked. The stairway was the only other way, and there was a man with a rifle up there.
That’s when things really began to happen. I heard noisy action in the fireplace before I understood what was going on. And then it was like the night before Christmas, but instead of one little round man with a round stomach coming down, there swarmed down that rope three of the liveliest soot-covered Santa Clauses you ever saw or heard. Big Jim was first. He was out of the fireplace with a bound, followed by Circus and Little Jim.
Still, even though we all had muscles like the village blacksmith’s, the man we were trying to capture was like a roaring lion. He had fists
as hard as sledgehammers! I found that out when one of them landed ker-whamety-squash against my jaw, and I went down like a scarecrow cut loose from a tree branch.
I wasn’t knocked out. I still had a few wits left, enough to see our cursing, grunting, fierce-fighting fugitive from justice roll out of Big Jim’s and Circus’s and Little Jim’s clutches. He shook them off like a bear shaking off a pack of dogs. Then I saw his right hand shove inside his jacket and whip out a pistol from a shoulder holster.
I was so close to being knocked out that I couldn’t move, but I could yell, and I did. “Look out, everybody! He’s got a gun! He’s got a gun!”
“You bet I’ve got a gun, you little whippersnappers! And I’m going to use it on the first little demon of you that makes another move!”
He was like a bear at bay as he stood crouching with his back to the fireplace. All of us stood in front of him. He was holding his pistol in one hand, and the doubled-up fist of the other hand was closed so tightly that the knuckles showed white. I knew that we had lost the battle and wondered what a man who was armed and extremely dangerous would do to a gang of boys?
That’s when I saw the end of the rope in the fireplace behind him moving excitedly and heard a noise in the chimney. A second later a spindle-legged Santa Claus came down with a bound, stormed out of the fireplace, made a dive like a tackle stopping a quarterback, grabbed Crimp the Shrimp by one of his legs and held on for dear life, his face set like a bulldog’s.
There was a crash as Crimp the Shrimp went down. He struck his head on a corner of the fireplace hearth, let out a groan, went limp, and lay sprawled on the floor.
Dragonfly, the poorest fighter of any of us and the most superstitious, was a hero. He had maybe saved one or more of our lives. All we would have to do now would be to get the rope out of the fireplace and tie up our prisoner. If there was a reward for capturing him, we could claim it.
In the back of my mind, though, was something else. There was more trouble upstairs. Where was the man with the rifle, the man who had been so dog tired he had lain down and gone to sleep and had slept all through our fierce, fast, fistfight with Crimp the Shrimp? What had happened to him?
We found out when we heard a step on the stairs. Looking up, we saw the man, the rifle in his hands, holding it ready to use if he thought he had to, or if he wanted to.
6
The rifleman had something else in his hands. To my astonishment, it was a pair of metal ringlike things with a chain connecting each to the other.
Handcuffs! my mind exclaimed. And my mind was right. What would he do with them? Which one of us would—
That was as far as I got to think, because right then Dragonfly cried, “Hear that! It’s Alexander’s ghost again! There’s two of him now!”
I didn’t even have to listen to hear. From outside the house there came a dog’s excited voice, like a hound’s on a red-hot coon trail. It was like two hounds, rather, going wild and about to bring their quarry to bay.
It was no time to argue with one of your best friends who had just saved your life, when you were maybe in even more danger than you had been. But I couldn’t keep myself from exploding back at him. “Those are hounds! Alexander the Coppersmith wasn’t any hound! He was a crossbreed of half a dozen different kinds of dogs!”
Dragonfly was right, though. There were dogs barking, and they were wild with excitement. It sounded as though they were near the creek and were coming fast toward the house where we were.
Right then is when the rifleman swooped down on Crimp the Shrimp—if it was Crimp the Shrimp—and handcuffed him, saying at the same time, “You would break into my trailer and steal my air mattress and camp stove, would you! Well, you’re going to jail, and I’m going to take you there! Do you hear me! I say—”
He didn’t get to finish his sentence, because right then there was a man’s very loud voice calling from outside the house, where the hounds were still whooping it up.
“All right, Crimp! We know you’re in there! Come on out with your hands up!”
At almost the same second another voice came from somewhere inside the house. “Hey, you guys down there! Give me a break, will you? Get me out of here!”
There was also a pounding noise upstairs. It was Poetry, the barrel-shaped member of the gang, still locked in the attic. He was too big around to get through the hole into the chimney and come down like the rest of us, and he had missed out on all the dangerous fun we’d been having.
Things happened fast after that, and I was in the middle of even more exciting excitement than I had been.
It took only a few minutes to find out that the man outside, ordering our unconscious prisoner to come out with his hands up, was the sheriff. There was a posse with him, and the wild-with-excitement hounds were bloodhounds. They’d been trailing Crimp the Shrimp all day. When the storm struck, the dogs had lost the trail and hadn’t found it again until the rain let up. Hounds can’t follow a trail when there is a rainstorm to wash away the scent.
The rifleman turned out to be Jake Peters, who lived in the next county in a homemade house trailer. When Crimp the Shrimp had broken in one night that week and stolen his air mattress, a camp stove, and other things, Jake had been so mad that he had gotten himself deputized and started out on a one-man manhunt. The fact that Jake was hard of hearing and hadn’t had any sleep for two nights explained quite a few things to my curious mind.
In the middle of the excitement, somebody went upstairs and got Poetry out of his attic jail. When he came down, he was grumpily mumbling something about going on a diet.
And I got a chance to use my first-aid supplies on Crimp the Shrimp, for that’s who it turned out our prisoner was. It took me only a little while to put Merthiolate and a bandage on his gashed temple where he had struck the fireplace hearth and also on his arm where it looked as if he’d been scratched by some briers.
I had a few scratches and bruises on my own soot-tarnished self.
A little later, after a lot of explanations and a little advice from the sheriff, and also thanks, and after they had taken down all our names and our addresses, the gang was alone again. We were outside the house and beside the canine cemetery, ready to do what we had come to do in the first place—rebury Alexander the Coppersmith.
The late afternoon sun was casting long shadows across the woods when we finished the work the moles had started under the elderberry bush. Then we went back into the house to get Old Tom the Trapper’s musical album.
We took the loose board out of the fireplace where it had fallen, carried it back upstairs, and put it where it had been. We slid the closet’s secret panel into place again and took a final look at the tinned supplies. The camp stove and the air mattress were already gone, taken home by the rifleman. And pretty soon we were on our way to Old Man Paddler’s cabin.
Anybody watching us would have thought we were an odd-looking gang of boys. Five of us from head to toe were like St. Nicholas had been in “The Night Before Christmas,” clothes “all tarnished with ashes and soot.”
But in spite of the way we looked and the bruises we all had—especially me—we felt fine. What a story we would have to tell our folks when we got back! And how surprised Old Man Paddler would be to see Tom the Trapper’s missing musical album!
First, we washed the shovel and the spade very carefully in the creek, so Old Man Paddler would be pleased we had remembered his final orders. We also washed off most of the ashes and soot from our hands and faces.
“Let me carry the album,” Little Jim begged, and Big Jim let him. He also let me carry the shovel and Poetry the spade.
Dragonfly was worried about his cowboy boots being stained, until we got most of the ashes and soot off. It made me feel fine the way he trudged along, not limping even a little bit, even though I was limping a little myself from what had happened to my left big toe on the way down the chimney.
I had a Band-Aid on it, though, and it didn’t hurt too much. That Band-Aid woul
d be proof to my folks that I had been at least a half-hero in the big fight to capture Crimp the Shrimp.
Dragonfly was worried about something, though. “I hope your mother has my clothes ready when we get there,” he said to me.
It took us only about ten minutes to get to the place where the fallen ponderosa made a bridge across the canyon. There we stopped to think and to remember what had happened there the week before and to take a final look down at the place where Alexander’s first grave had been.
“You know what?” Little Jim said just before we got there.
“What?” I asked.
And he answered, “Let’s name the place where Alexander saved my life Wildcat Canyon!”
It seemed a good idea, so we quick voted on it, and that became the name of the place where Alexander the Coppersmith had fought a duel to the death with a fierce-fanged, savage-tempered wildcat, saving Little Jim’s life by doing it.
“Hear that?” Dragonfly exclaimed all of a sudden. The way he exclaimed it and the excitement in his voice made me think maybe he was hearing Alexander’s ghost again.
We all listened, not knowing for sure what to expect to hear.
“Sounds like a windstorm in the woods somewhere! Maybe it’s going to rain again. We’d better hurry on home!” his worried voice whined.
It did sound like wind in the woods. But it also sounded as if there had already been a big rainstorm somewhere and Sugar Creek was on a rampage. Yet, I knew we were too far from the creek to be hearing it. Besides, we had washed the spade and shovel in the creek only fifteen minutes ago, and Sugar Creek had been only a little higher than usual.
“Flash flood!” Big Jim cried and broke into a run toward the rim of the canyon with the rest of us at his heels.
I saw it the minute I got there and looked down. Far down and down and down, where two or three hours ago there had been a pile of stones marking the grave of Alexander the Coppersmith, there was now a river of seething, hissing, turbulent water.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 31-36 Page 28