There wasn’t any time to lose now. I could feel myself already on a chase, looking for a girl in a red dress, trying to find her and get her to a doctor for the Pasteur treatment, which is what they do for anybody bitten by an animal with rabies. I knew because I want to be a doctor someday and had read about it in a book I borrowed from the thinking boy’s best friend.
“She’s got to be around here somewhere,” I managed to say between about a thousand other words flying back and forth. “Or else why did she lose her shoes here?”
And that’s when we found out that she didn’t lose her shoes here. Her father himself had lost them. He had dropped them accidentally out of the helicopter early that morning when they’d been flying around searching the area for some sign of her.
Elsie had left the shoes at the covered bridge in Parke County, where—with three other young people—she’d been in a terrible car accident. Two of the four had been killed and a third was in the hospital right that minute for serious head injuries. At the scene of the wreck, they’d found Elsie’s red shoes, the pair she had probably been wearing when she climbed out the window of her home and went on a wild ride with her friends.
The girl’s worried father, who had been telling us the sad story, wound up by saying, “I just know she’s somewhere, wandering around in a daze, maybe with amnesia or terribly hurt.”
“How come she left just her shoes at the bridge?” Poetry asked. “Wasn’t there any other clue, such as a handkerchief or anything? Or maybe a handbag?”
All our thoughts were interrupted then by a voice coming in on the helicopter radio. It was the police, saying a girl of Elsie’s description had been seen in one of the sandstone ravines of Turkey Run State Park.
And that’s why we were soon alone again with only a wagon and a balled spruce tree, while the whirlybird was climbing fast toward the high horizon in the northwest, skimming the tops of the trees and hills on the way toward the sandstone gorges of Turkey Run State Park.
All we had left of what we’d thought was going to be a real mystery for us to solve was the small wad of paper we’d found in one of the shoes.
We still didn’t know why it had been in there, but Little Jim’s guess was as good as any. He said, “I bet both her shoes were a little too loose, and she had a wad of paper in each one. The other wad fell out when she had the accident or maybe when the shoes fell out of the whirlybird.”
There was a dark brown cloud in my mind somewhere, a great big ache that made me wish and wish and wish they’d find the girl and get her to a doctor before it would be too late.
In my mind I could see what might be happening to her if the squirrel that had bitten her had really been rabid. First, the place where the bite was would start to hurt, and then her voice would get husky, and she wouldn’t be able to swallow easily. Then she wouldn’t be able even to stand the sight of water because of the terrible pain in her throat. After that she would become paralyzed, and, if she didn’t get a doctor’s help quickly, she would die, as the helicopter pilot had said.
Knowing all that about what rabies does to people, it seemed I ought to do about the only thing I had left to do. As I stooped at the spring to get another drink, I heard myself whispering, “Please, heavenly Father, help them find her! Help the doctor, if they get her to him. And if she’s not a Christian, help her get a chance to get saved, especially if she’s not going to get well, so she can go to heaven.”
Poetry must have guessed what I hardly knew myself I was doing. A few seconds later, when we were all on our way to the cabin again to lock up before going home with the balled tree, he slipped his hand through my arm and whispered to me part of a Bible verse I’d learned once, “‘Is anything too difficult for the Lord?’”
I knew there wasn’t, but I also knew that most of the hard things God did for people, He used other people to help Him do it—people like a doctor or a nurse or even a boy.
In a little while we were inside the cabin, and that’s when our mystery came to life in a new way and landed us all right in the middle of it. While I was upstairs in the loft, checking on things up there, I stumbled onto a real clue. In fact, I stumbled over it. When I reached for the banister to brace myself from falling, my hand missed it and I went down.
Whatever it was I’d stumbled over went scooting across the floor to the head of the stairs and bumpety-bump, ploppety-plop-plop all the way to the bottom.
What on earth! I thought as my wondering eyes looked down the steps and saw what it was. A red plaid suitcase was lying on its side, where it had finally stopped under the old man’s kitchen table. Even in the fleeting glimpse I’d just had, I noticed it had a red handle and its locks were brass like those on the suitcase my mother had taken with her to Memory City.
While I was shuffling my way to my feet, I exclaimed down to the rest of the gang, “He left in such a hurry, he forgot part of his luggage! You suppose we ought to rush it to town and ship it to him?”
In seconds I was downstairs.
Big Jim had already picked up the red plaid suitcase and set it on the table. All of us started giving different suggestions about what to do with it.
“I’ll bet he left all his spending money in it,” was Dragonfly’s idea. “We’d better open it and find out, and if he did, we can—we can—”
“We can what?” I asked.
Dragonfly lifted his hands, palms up, and shrugged as he so often does when he doesn’t know anything or doesn’t want to say.
Little Jim piped up then. “Maybe it’s got his book manuscript in it—the one about Christians keeping right on living after they’re dead. They’re not dead at all but are in another place like a spruce tree. Maybe he wanted to write more on it out there.”
Suddenly Poetry quacked out his detective-like idea, a different thought than any of us had had up to then. “Look, gang, who said it was Old Man Paddler’s suitcase? Maybe it’s not his at all. Do you notice what color it is? That’s the same color as somebody’s red shoes! Maybe it belongs to whoever the shoes belong to!”
He had no sooner startled us with that than I heard from somewhere in the house a half-smothered sneeze. I looked at the faces of the rest of the gang, and there wasn’t a single leftover sign of any of them having sneezed or trying to smother one. My mind told me the sound had come from upstairs where I had just been.
My ears told me something else also. One of the windows up there was being opened—maybe the one I knew led out onto the roof of the old man’s back porch!
And then there was a noise on the roof itself, a clatter like the one on the lawn in the poem “The Night Before Christmas,” where it says, “Out on the lawn there arose such a clatter, I sprang from my bed to see what was the matter.”
When several of us sprang to our feet to dash out and around the corner of the cabin to see what was the matter, I glimpsed what Poetry had warned me back in the swamp to be on the lookout for—a red dress with a girl in it! Except that she was wearing bright red pants instead. She was poised at the farther edge of the porch when I first spotted her. Her hair was the color of one of the mountain flowers called Indian paintbrush. We’d seen thousands of them on our trip to the Rockies one summer.
Quicker than a firefly’s fleeting flash, the girl was over the edge of the porch and gone. When I glimpsed her again, she was gliding like a bird toward the woodshed, the clump of baby spruce, and Tennyson’s brook. A fraction of a second later—she was moving fast—she disappeared into the thicket of shrubs growing there.
What on earth! In fact, double what on earth!
4
We didn’t wait until Elsie, if that was who she was, reached the brook and leaped over and disappeared into the thicket. Half of us were already after her as fast as we could go, and I heard my voice calling, “Stop! Don’t run away! We want to get you to a doctor. Your pet squirrel had rabies!”
But our yells and scared screams didn’t make any more impression on her than six rocks thrown into a Sugar Cree
k riffle could stop the water from racing on.
Circus, still carrying his bow and arrow, reached the woodshed first, ran past, and in a flash was leaping over a narrow place in Tennyson’s brook. I was third in the chase, right behind Big Jim, with Poetry, Dragonfly, and Little Jim bringing up the rear.
Even as I passed the open woodshed door, I was reminded that we had to clean the old man’s spade we’d borrowed and put it back in its place. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the rick of fireplace wood, the wheelbarrow, and the old man’s workbench, where he sometimes made outdoor furniture to sell to people. Above the workbench on the wall were his carpenter’s tools—a handsaw, several different kinds of hammers, a brace and bit set. On the long workbench was a coil of new rope, and a carpenter’s square leaned against the back wall beside an aluminum level. I had seen these things earlier when we went in there to get the spade in the first place.
“Stop! Elsie, stop!” I was yelling.
I suppose all our voices yelling after the runaway girl were kind of like Mr. McGregor’s voice yelling for Peter Rabbit to stop—it only scared Peter more and made him run faster. There was only one difference. Mr. McGregor was angry at the innocent rabbit for getting into his garden, but we certainly weren’t angry at Elsie, if that was who she was.
Even as I ran, catching every now and then a glimpse of red through the bushes, I realized that red was a good color for hunters to wear so that somebody else hunting could see them and not think they were some kind of game and shoot them.
It was hard to believe a girl could run that fast. She was keeping ahead of our fastest runner, Circus, who, still with his bow and arrow, was like a hound on a hot coon trail. He was leaping over fallen logs, dodging brush piles, and ducking under overhanging branches but not catching up with her.
All the time we were getting higher, heading toward the rocky hills and the haunted house far ahead of us. If she kept going the direction she was going now, pretty soon she’d reach the narrow gulch with its sheer drop-off.
“We’ll catch her now,” Poetry puffed from behind me. “That’s a dead end.”
“No, it’s not!” I panted back to him. “Don’t you remember? The old dead ponderosa blew over in a storm last year and made a bridge across the gulch!”
“That’s what I said,” Poetry puffed. “It’s a dead end. If she crosses the fallen tree to the ledge on the other side, she can’t go any farther forward or up or down!”
My mind’s eye was in the history section of my mind, remembering the excitement of the wildcat chase we had here and the fight my cousin’s dog, Alexander the Coppersmith, had on that high ledge with a fierce-fanged colt killer. Both the wildcat and Alexander fell over the edge and down, down, down to the rocks below at the bottom of the gulch, and both of them were killed in the fall.
If a dog and a wildcat could fall that far and both of them be killed, so could a girl!
Right then there was a noise in the sky, and I looked up quickly, expecting to see the helicopter again. I hoped it was, because maybe the girl’s father could call down to her to stop running away and let them take her to a doctor for rabies shots. But there wasn’t a sign of the whirlybird. Instead, there was a lead-colored sky with some of the clouds looking pretty fierce, as they do when there’s going to be a lot of wind and rain.
Another thing I remembered right then was that sometimes, after a heavy cloudburst higher in the hills, a wall of water comes rushing down the ravine, sweeping everything away.
Once I’d seen a jackrabbit down there all of a sudden wake up to the fact that there was going to be a flash flood. He made a dive for the cliff wall, started up, missed his footing, and landed in a tangle at the bottom again. Before the rabbit could get out of the way, the wall of water hit, and he was swept downstream over the rocks. I never did find out whether he drowned.
But maybe I didn’t need to worry about a flash flood. Not more than every few years was there a cloudburst big enough to send a wall of water down like that. Besides, nobody was down at the bottom of the gulch now, anyway.
I heard Circus up ahead of us yelling, “Don’t do that! Don’t go across! That’s a dead end! You get over there on that ledge, and that’s as far as you can go!”
Big Jim’s deeper voice yelled, too.
And even though I couldn’t see the girl right then, I could guess where she was. “Your pet squirrel—it had hydrophobia, and we’ve got to get you to a doctor!” I half screamed.
Then I saw the red plaid blouse again, and the girl in it was already halfway across the narrow tree bridge on her way to the ledge on the other side. In a few seconds she’d have worked her way across to where there were four feet of ledge, several twisted juniper trees, and a sheer cliff wall. In the wall was the deep hollow that had been the wildcat’s lair. I didn’t like to think about what was below.
For the first time then, I heard the girl’s voice. She screamed back to us, “You want to make me go back home, and I won’t do it! I’ll never do it!”
For a second, she almost lost her balance. She swayed this way and that, her arms swinging. That’s when I saw the bandage on her right hand, and I knew why it was there!
In only another little while, she had balanced her way all the way across to the ledge side. Now she would see that she really was at what Poetry called a dead end. She could go only maybe twenty feet to the right and only about ten feet to the left, which was as far as the four-foot-wide ledge went in either direction.
In front of her was the deep depression in the wall that had been old Stubtail the wildcat’s lair. There was a very narrow, rocky, almost straight-up-and-down way to the bottom of the gorge, which Stubtail had used, but it wasn’t safe for any human being to try, especially since most of it had been washed out in last year’s cloudburst. Not a one of the gang had ever dared try it.
Anyway, there Elsie was, caught in a trap. She turned and stood in her red blouse and red pants, looking across at us, her back to the wall. Her eyes were kind of wild. She was like a fox at bay with a pack of hounds closing in on her. It was ridiculous, the thought of a runaway girl being an animal at bay and the six members of the Sugar Creek Gang that many hounds ready to rush in upon her and tear her to pieces. It was ridiculous because all we wanted to do was help her.
We were all at the edge of the gorge now on our side of the ponderosa bridge only about twenty feet from her.
“Please!” Big Jim said. “We’re your friends. We don’t want to hurt you! We want to help you. Your father was here a little while ago in a helicopter. Maybe you heard it. He says they’ve found out your pet squirrel that bit you was rabid and you have to get to a doctor or … or …”
Big Jim hated to say the word I knew he had in his mind, but I knew it was the truth.
“Your hand!” I called. “Has it begun to hurt yet? Real bad, I mean?”
“Come on back across,” Big Jim coaxed her. “We’ll get you to a doctor as quick as we can!”
But she just stood and stared at us, and I noticed she was shaking with sobs. “It’s my fault they got killed!” she cried. “I kept telling them to drive faster. It’s my fault! My fault!”
And there on the ledge at the place where the deep depression was in the cliff wall, she sank down and broke all to pieces in her mind and cried and cried.
Well, a boy can be terribly disgusted with a girl about a lot of things and wonder sometimes if girls even belong to the human race, but when one of them cries with a broken heart, he wants to be her friend and do something to really help her. It seemed I wanted to go racing across the log bridge and hand her my handkerchief. I might even want to help wipe the tears away or maybe say something that would take the pain out of her hurt heart. I certainly didn’t expect her to listen to Big Jim.
But all of a sudden she gritted her teeth, pressed her left hand on her right one where the bandage was, and grimaced as though she was in pain. I thought I knew what that meant. It was the first thing a person noticed if he�
�d been bitten by a rabid animal—the bite began to hurt more than at first. Then she looked across at us, started toward the tree bridge, stopped, looked over the edge at the ragged outcroppings of rock below, and quickly drew back.
“She’s scared!” Poetry hissed into my ear.
A second later, she herself said, “I’m afraid! I don’t think—”
“We’ll help you!” Big Jim’s kind voice called over to her. “Wait a minute!”
Big Jim and Circus both started across. They were only halfway when I heard a different kind of noise—not a helicopter’s whirling wings and throbbing motor, not a rumble of thunder, not a wild wind in the trees, but a cracking noise. The rim of the ledge on the other side, which held up the far end of the ponderosa trunk, was starting to crumble. A half-dozen rocks broke loose and slid down into the gorge. The big old tree staggered and trembled.
“Hurry!” Big Jim yelled back to Circus. “The bridge is going down!”
It was too sickening to even hear, let alone look at. I stood and cried on the inside as I imagined two of the best boys there ever were in the world being dashed to pieces on the rocks below. Then I saw Big Jim leap off the end of the tree and onto the ledge, balance himself, and fall on his knees there, safe.
Circus, still several feet from the ledge, made a flying leap, too, as the log bridge went down—but his jump was too short. Ahead of him, his bow and arrow landed on the ledge. Maybe that was why he was late in getting himself across. He’d taken a fleeting second to toss his bow-fishing outfit first.
It was too horrible to think about, but it had to be faced. Our Circus, our acrobat, the boy who had the best singing voice in Sugar Creek, who was always singing church songs about the Savior, might never sing again.
Even at a time like that, though, when the crying inside of you is enough to tear you to pieces, when your voice is stuck in your throat and you can’t say a word, you can do something. You can do what a visiting minister once said in our church—you can “flash pray.” You can send up wordless prayers that go up as fast as lightning comes down. And that’s what I realized I was doing.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 31-36 Page 32