Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 31-36

by Paul Hutchens

  It certainly felt fine to have the rest of the gang with us. We needed a few extra muscles anyway to help ball the tree and especially to help lift it into the wagon, since the ball of dirt was going to be very heavy.

  “We get to come up every other day to water the flowers and shrubs,” Dragonfly said. He drew back with his sling and let go a small stone in the direction of the old man’s spring, where there was a tin can standing on a rock shelf. His rock just barely missed the can.

  “Let me show you how to do it,” Circus said.

  Carefully, Circus took aim with the bow and arrow he’d brought with him. The homemade arrow flew straight as a bullet, whammed into the tin cup, and sent it tumbling into the spring reservoir.

  That’s when I noticed the arrow had a long string fastened to it, and the string had unrolled from what looked like a plastic drinking cup fastened to the bow. In a second, Circus was winding the string back onto the drinking cup, and the arrow followed along toward us on the other end.

  Guessing I was curious about the plastic cup attached to the bow, Circus explained, “It’s a homemade reel for bow-fishing. This is spawning season for carp and suckers, and I’m going to shoot a few for our hogs. You guys see any in the muskrat pond?”

  We hadn’t, but we had seen something else—a girl’s red leather slip-on shoe. I was about to tell Circus and the rest of the gang but didn’t even get started, because Circus was so proud of his homemade bow-fishing outfit that he cut in on me.

  Holding up his outfit for us to study, he explained, “First, you take a plastic cup like this, stick a heated knife blade clear through it near the bottom, and then you use the slits to strap the cup onto the bow. Like this, see?”

  It was hard to “see” when I wanted to talk myself.

  “All you have to do,” he said proudly, “is run the end of a kite string through the screw eye here at the nock and along the length of the arrow to the arrowhead. You fasten it, and you’re ready for business. When you’ve stalked a carp or a school of ’em, you just take aim, shoot, and wham! you’ve got a fish!”

  When he finished, I still had only a foggy idea of how he’d made his outfit. I did see that he’d driven a slender nail through one of his arrows just above the point, driving it at a sharp angle so that, where the nail’s pointed end came through, it made a barb for fastening the string.

  Each one of the four had brought something with him: Circus, his bow-fishing outfit; Little Jim, his walking stick; Big Jim, Old Man Paddler’s ring of keys; and Dragonfly, his slingshot.

  Dragonfly had also brought something else. What it was I discovered a little later when I saw him starting to play with a red shoe, tossing it up and catching it as it came down!

  “Hey!” I exclaimed to that little rascal. “That’s a clue to a kidnapping or something! I found it back in the swamp at the edge of the pond!”

  “You did not!” he said saucily and kept on tossing up the shoe and catching it as it came down. “I found it myself at the mouth of the cave!”

  I looked in my wagon, where I’d put the red leather slip-on shoe Poetry and I had found, and what to my wondering eyes should appear but the shoe itself, still there. Dragonfly had a right shoe instead of a left.

  “Where’d you say you found it?” I asked him.

  That’s when he spied the shoe in the wagon and made a dive for it. “I wondered where the mate was!” he cried happily. “Now I’ve got a whole pair!” He plopped himself down beside Tennyson’s brook, took off his sneakers, and in a flash was up and strutting around in the red shoes.

  “Those are girl’s shoes!” Poetry scoffed. “You want to look like a girl?”

  Dragonfly stopped, glanced in the direction of the afternoon sun, got a messed-up expression on his face, and sneezed a long sneeze that could have been heard almost as far away as the swamp.

  For a second I’d forgotten what Poetry and I came up there to do. My mind was all tangled up in the mystery again. Now we had two lost-and-found shoes!

  Dragonfly’s noisy sneeze must have given Circus an idea. Right away he flapped his arms at his sides the way our old red rooster flaps his wings before he crows. Then he cupped his hands to his lips to make a megaphone out of them, threw back his head, and let out toward the sky a bloodcurdling scream like a wildcat’s or a mountain lion’s. It also sounded like a half-scared-to-death woman in danger of her life. It was the same sound Poetry and I had heard when we were in the swamp.

  Before I could gather my scattered thoughts, Circus cut loose with another high-pitched cry, this time like the mournful wail of a northern lakes loon.

  It certainly was deflating. It was like having a blowout and losing all the air in a tire on the car you are riding in to have the hysterical cries I’d been afraid of back near the muskrat pond turn out to be just one of the gang mimicking a wildcat and a loon. Circus had probably made the sounds just before they went into the cave to go to Old Man Paddler’s cabin the back way.

  Well, it took some of the danger out of our mystery, but it didn’t solve it. We still had a pair of girl’s red shoes on our hands. Or feet.

  And Dragonfly was still strutting around in them near Tennyson’s brook. I noticed he was walking with a limp.

  “What’s the matter?” Little Jim asked him. “One shoe got a nail in it?”

  The question started Poetry in again.

  “For want of a nail, the shoe was lost,

  For want of a shoe—”

  That was as far as he quoted before Dragonfly fired back at Little Jim, “One of them’s too short. Feels like there’s something stuffed in the toe.”

  With that, he plopped himself down on the grass again, whisked off the left shoe, and took out of its toe a folded piece of paper, which he gave an over-the-shoulder toss toward the brook. It landed in a riffle and was whisked away downstream, dancing over the covered rocks and around the uncovered ones as if in a hurry to get as far away from us as possible.

  “You goof!” Poetry cried at Dragonfly and started racing after the wad of paper. “That might have been a clue!”

  Even before Poetry finished saying that, I was scooting downstream after it myself. But Circus, faster than either Poetry or me, swished past us and in a flash caught up with the clue or whatever it was. He reached out and scooped it up.

  3

  I don’t know what I’d expected to find in or on the wad of paper Dragonfly had tossed into the brook. It could have been something very important, or it could have been nothing at all.

  But the way we scampered to Circus and gathered around in a semicircle to see what he had found was like something I see happen every day in our barnyard. A mother hen finds a nice juicy fishing worm near the pitcher pump, clucks to her family of little chickens to come to dinner, and a half-dozen or more fluffy, cheeping, hungry baby chicks come running from every direction and gather around her, bills first.

  I hadn’t any sooner started pecking away with my eyes on what Circus had just unfolded and smoothed out than I decided it wasn’t worth all the hurrying we’d done to get it.

  “It’s nothing,” he said, bursting my hope balloon all to smithereens.

  In front of our twelve eyes, all focused on the smoothed-out clue, was nothing but about a fourth of a newspaper page. I guess maybe I’d been hoping that on the wadded-up paper would be a note the girl had written and stuffed into the shoe before she threw it away. If anybody found it, they could read the note, which would maybe say, “Help! I’m being kidnapped!” Or maybe it would say something else exciting, such as telling who she was and where she’d come from and who her kidnapper was.

  We had a quick conference there beside the half-balled spruce tree to see if anybody had any ideas as to who or what or when or how or why whatever was going on was going on, if it was.

  Little Jim’s mouselike voice managed to get heard above the rest of ours. “It’s like the fairy story of Hansel and Gretel, whose parents didn’t want them anymore and took them out into t
he woods to lose them. Hansel filled his pockets with little white stones and dropped them all along the way to leave a trail for him and his sister to get home by. I’ll bet she dropped her shoes like that to mark the kidnapper’s trail and—”

  Little Jim stopped as if he knew his idea wasn’t any good, even before Dragonfly broke in to scoff, “Who in the world could follow a trail made by only two dropped shoes? Besides, who said her parents didn’t want her? Maybe she didn’t want her parents!”

  Poetry’s idea wasn’t much better. He proposed, “That wad of paper shows one thing anyway. The shoes didn’t belong to her!”

  “Didn’t belong to her!” I challenged him. “How in the world do you know that?”

  “Because,” he quacked back, “they were too large for her. She had to stuff wads of paper in them so they’d fit tight enough to stay on.” He quickly stooped, lifted Dragonfly’s left foot, and whisked off the red shoe.

  Dragonfly lost his balance and fell sprawling on the grass, almost rolling into the brook.

  “See?” Poetry began in a tone of voice he tried to make sound like a lawman’s. “This shoe was worn by a little girl about eight years old. She was the youngest child in the family, and her older brothers and sisters made her feel just how little she was all the time. They were always calling her the baby in the family. Little Marian felt so humiliated and angry that she decided to run away from home. One morning early, she slipped into her older sister’s room, put on her red shoes, went out the side door, and scooted silently across the road and into the woods and—”

  “Hold it!” Big Jim charged in with his voice to stop Poetry. “Everybody calm down and talk a little sense!”

  Little Jim, whose Hansel and Gretel idea hadn’t been any good, broke in with another. “One foot was smaller than the other. That’s why she stuffed paper in only one shoe. She was crippled in one leg, so one foot was a lot littler than the other and—”

  Well, we certainly weren’t getting anywhere with our ideas. We’d better finish balling our tree. I had to hurry to get its primaries, secondaries, tertiaries, obliques, and its millions of root hairs in the ball of dirt, carefully and tightly wrapped in the gunnysack we’d brought. Then we’d ramble along through the swamp and all the way home and get it set by the orchard fence at the end of the hollyhock row between the two cherry trees before Mom and Dad and Charlotte Ann got back from Memory City.

  We still didn’t know what Big Jim thought about the shoes. Maybe he’d been waiting to get our different ideas, then put them all together and make out of them a brand-new idea better than any of them. It seemed our ideas were only a lot of wet wood being thrown onto a smoldering campfire.

  But when Big Jim came out with his idea, it was like throwing on the fire only a little bigger wet log than ours had been. Here is what he just that second said:

  “One thing we do know, gang, is that whoever she was or is, she reads the Indianapolis News. See here?”

  We all looked where he was pointing, and I saw the name of the paper and that it was dated just three days ago.

  “Did she live in Indianapolis then?” Little Jim asked.

  “Who knows?” Big Jim answered.

  Things certainly looked strange. We had on our hands a pair of red shoes, one of them found at the edge of the pond in the swamp and the other at the mouth of the cave. How in the world had they gotten there? Who had stuffed a wadded-up piece of the Indianapolis News in one of them, and why?

  Because we couldn’t do anything by doing nothing, we decided to get going on the tree and to think while we worked. My thinking father had taught me that was good for a boy. “It makes the work easier, and you get it done before you know it,” he had told me maybe fifty times.

  Circus, whose father had maybe taught him to sing while he worked, was humming along while we were finishing. It was one of the prettiest songs there ever was. Some of the words were, “I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree.”

  We knew we could never get the wagon with the tree in it down Old Man Paddler’s cellar steps and into the cave. And even if we could, we couldn’t pull it through the long, narrow winding passageway to the cave’s mouth. Those of us who were going to push and pull the wagon would have to go back the long way. The rest could take the shortcut through the cave and be waiting for us when we arrived. From the cave and the sycamore tree we could all go on to my house.

  But Big Jim decided for us, saying, “We’ll stay together.” He had a grim expression on his fuzzy-mustached face, and I noticed the muscles of his jaw were tense as if his teeth were pressed together and also as if his mind was set.

  Secretly, so that Little Jim wouldn’t hear me, I asked Big Jim, “You scared about something?” and he whispered back, “You just don’t find one girl’s shoe lying in the swamp and another at the mouth of the cave unless there’s something to think about anyway. And sh!”

  I knew what the “sh!” meant. It meant “don’t use the word scared around Little Jim.”

  Well, we would have to go back into the cabin again to lock the cellar door that led into the cave. We decided that, while we were inside, we would look around a little to see if the old man had closed all the windows to keep out the rain and had drawn the drapes and blinds to keep the hot sun from pouring in and fading any of his rugs. Maybe he’d overlooked something. There would have to be some light for his plants, too.

  I glanced toward the afternoon sky to see how much time we had yet before sundown and was surprised to see some mountain-high, cream-colored cumulus clouds, the kind Dad calls thunderheads. It might even rain before we could get home, I thought.

  As soon as we had all stopped for a drink apiece at the old man’s spring, we started to the cabin. We had gotten as far as the steps leading to the door when we were startled by a sound we hardly ever heard around Sugar Creek. It was like a tornado tearing along through the woods.

  “Airplane!” Circus exclaimed.

  But that was before we saw it.

  “It’s a whirlybird!” Little Jim cried gleefully. His cute little face looked as if somebody had turned on a light behind it.

  We saw the helicopter for only a few seconds. Then it disappeared, its horizontal propellers carrying it low above the trees and hills, swinging northwest up the deep gulch and out of sight.

  “There’s your answer,” Poetry whispered to me. “That’s where the shoes came from. I told you they fell from somewhere. Somebody up there didn’t want them and just threw them out. One shoe landed by the sycamore tree at the mouth of the cave and the other in the swamp at the edge of the pond.”

  “What on earth!” I said and got corrected by Dragonfly.

  “Not what on earth! But what in the sky!”

  I could tell by the expression on his face that he thought what he’d said was funny. And he could tell I didn’t think it was by the expression on mine.

  The whirlybird hadn’t any sooner disappeared over the horizon in the direction of the gathering clouds, than it sounded as if it was coming back again.

  It not only sounded like it, but it looked like it. The helicopter swung back into view over the rim of the highest hill, circling and zigzagging and all the time getting nearer the open area where Old Man Paddler’s cabin was—and, of course, where we were.

  Poetry, still acting like a detective, took on a teacherlike tone of voice as he said, “That, gentlemen, is a flying machine held up by a stream of air driven downward by propellers turning on a vertical axis. By vertical, of course, we mean perpendicular. By perpendicular we mean pointing to the zenith—straight up, to you who may not know what the zenith is. You take that helicopter coming yonder—”

  “No,” Big Jim cut in on him to say, “you take it. In fact it looks like we’re all going to take it in another minute or two.”

  Sure enough, that flying machine with its propellers whirling on a vertical axis was circling lower now and in a few minutes would be down far enough to land.

  The helico
pter landed in the open space near the old man’s spring, and two strange men stepped out. One of them was red-haired and short, and the other wore a pilot’s cap. They both lowered their heads as they hurried toward us under the whirling blades of the helicopter. The man with the cap held onto it to keep the wind from blowing it off.

  I thought there was what looked like a lot of worry on the red-haired man’s red face. He called out to us above the whirring of the slowing helicopter motor. “You boys seen anything of my daughter around here anywhere? A girl about fourteen years old? In a red dress?”

  Detective Leslie Thompson’s answer was guarded, as if he didn’t trust the men at all. “Maybe we have, and maybe we haven’t. What’s she wanted for? What’s she done?”

  After all, how did we know she was his daughter? Maybe the men were kidnappers.

  The other man cut in then, and his voice was sharp, “She’s wanted for rabies treatment. Her pet squirrel bit her on the hand yesterday, and we’ve just found out it was rabid. If we don’t find her and get her to a doctor, she’ll die!”

  You should have seen the frightened look on the red-haired man’s red face when the pilot said that.

  Also, you could feel Detective Thompson change his attitude.

  Of course, we had not seen a girl, but we knew one had been around here somewhere last night or early this morning because of the shoes we had found. It took us only a few seconds, with all our voices helping a little, to tell the men what we knew and for Dragonfly to quickly take off the shoes he had put on again and thrust them toward the red-haired man.

  Dragonfly said, “This is how come we know she was here. We found them—one of them down there in the swamp by the muskrat pond and the other at the mouth of the cave!”

  It was really pitiful the way that red-haired father clasped those shoes to his breast as if they were his daughter and he had just found her. He let out a sob, saying, “Oh, Elsie! My Elsie! What have I done to you!”