Almost before the dust of the falling rock cleared away, I was looking over the ledge to see what had happened to Circus, expecting to see our suntanned, curly-haired acrobat down at the bottom, mangled and bleeding.
Instead, I heard him call up to us, “I’m safe! I’m all right!”
Then I saw him, only about fifteen feet below. He was on a very narrow outcropping, half lying down. He was holding onto the twisted trunk of a windblown juniper that was growing out of the side of the ravine wall. His hat was gone, and his hair was blowing in the wind.
The wind! I thought. The wind was already sweeping up the gulch, and in a little while the storm would hit!
My parents had been trying to teach me that you just can’t let your mind go to pieces and be ruled by the way you feel. “You’re a thinking boy!” Dad had told me many times. “You have a good mind. When you’re in an emergency, think!”
But how can you think when you can’t think? I thought right then.
I was glad that Circus’s life was saved, but all three of them over there were in an emergency. There wasn’t any way for Elsie and Big Jim to get up the sheer wall of the cliff or down to the bottom. If they could get down, there was a way to get back up on our side. We knew that because we’d all gone down to the bottom to get Alexander the Coppersmith’s body and bury it. Later, we’d all gone down to dig it up and take it to Tom the Trapper’s dog cemetery beside the haunted house.
There had to be some way to get them all down so they could get back up.
There had to be, but it looked as if there was only one way.
“We’ve got to get a helicopter,” Little Jim called out. “Somebody in a helicopter could let down a rope with a noose on it, and you could step in one at a time and be pulled up.”
It wasn’t a good idea, though. Big Jim said that it wasn’t, almost before Little Jim finished saying it. “The whirling propellers would strike against the ravine wall, and they’d never be able to let down a rope long enough to reach from away up yonder to away down here!”
But Little Jim’s idea was like a seed planted in good Sugar Creek garden soil. The word rope seemed to stick in Elsie’s mind. She surprised us by saying, “This old juniper over here is alive and green! If it’s well rooted, we could tie a rope to it and get down that way!”
I could hardly believe my ears. I could see she was still scared, and I wondered how she could think that clearly. I also noticed she was still holding onto her right hand with her left, and I remembered why we were all in the middle of this emergency in the first place.
Rabies! I thought. Her pet squirrel was rabid!
There was a roll of thunder then, nearer than any of the other thunders had been.
Well, it had taken ideas from all our minds to finally come up with the right thing to do—and do quickly. One thing was in my mind. We had to have a rope, a long rope, long enough to reach from the juniper growing on the ravine ledge all the way down to near the bottom or to an outcropping they could stand on and work their way down from there.
Somewhere in my mind was a picture of a coil of rope, but where had I seen it? Where? And then I remembered. It was on the workbench in Old Man Paddler’s woodshed.
Right away I yelled my idea to the gang and just as quick got Big Jim’s order to get going.
Run! my mind told me! And my dad’s words were like a wind behind me, pushing me, putting wings on my feet as I sped down the long slope toward the old man’s cabin and the open door of the woodshed. Over fallen logs, dodging brush piles, ducking overhanging tree branches, swerving around rocks, leaping narrow gullies, I hurried.
Two worried thoughts were driving me: We had to get Elsie to a doctor quick so that she could be given the treatment for rabies. And we had to get the three of them—Big Jim, Circus, and Elsie—to the bottom of the gorge and up and out again before there was a flash flood!
We had to!
There was a real wind at my back, but so far it hadn’t started to rain. Rain, even if it wasn’t a cloudburst, would make everything harder. The noise in the treetops meant wind, I knew, even though I kept hoping the helicopter with the girl’s father was coming back.
If the gang could just get her across the gorge and back down to the open space near the old man’s spring, the helicopter could swoop down and whisk her away to the doctor. Otherwise, we would have a long, hurried hike through the cave, leaving my balled tree behind to come back for later, and a race to Poetry’s house to get his parents to rush Elsie to town in their car.
Hurry, hurry, hurry!
The cabin was in sight now. I could see both it and the woodshed below me. But the wind was getting wilder, and my hair was getting in my eyes—that’s how I realized my hat was gone. Maybe it had been blown off quite a while before.
But in a few seconds I’d be there, in the woodshed and out again with the coil of rope and panting back up the slope to the rescue.
What a wind! Big Jim and Elsie could work their way back inside the old wildcat’s lair and not get blown off the ledge, but could Circus hold onto his outcropping and the little juniper beside him?
That’s when I heard a loud bang! It was almost like a shot. It was also like the sound of our stable door slamming when there was a hard wind.
Now I was there. Like Peter Cottontail, I whisked around the corner of the woodshed to the open door. But the door wasn’t open! It was shut!
The door that had the latch already set so that all we would have do, when we finished with the old man’s spade, was to shut it and it would be locked—that door was shut now!
As I grabbed the knob and turned it and pulled on it, I realized the truth. The door had locked! And inside on the workbench was the rope we absolutely had to have—and quick!
5
The woodshed door was closed and locked. The rope we absolutely had to have was lying inside on the workbench! Three people were depending on me for help. One of them had to have that help in the fastest hurry anybody could get it for her!
It certainly wasn’t any time to let my feelings rule me—at least not the kind of feelings I had right that minute. Now was a time to think.
Part of a Bible verse I’d learned when I was just a little kid had come to my mind as I’d been flying down the hill—“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find.”
Also in my mind was a story I’d read about a brother and sister being chased by an angry goat. The goat was getting closer and closer every second. “Let’s stop and kneel down and pray!” the little sister said, but her thinking brother had panted to her, “Let’s not. Let’s run and pray!” And that’s what I’d been doing.
I couldn’t ask God to break one of His own laws of nature by unlocking the door for me, but I could ask Him to help me do what the second part of the Bible verse said. He could help me find a way to get the rope.
Even while I was thinking that, I remembered the wide window just above the workbench. If I could get that open, I could climb in and out again.
I ran around the woodshed, looked up at the window, which I knew slid sideways to open, then spied a cement block near the woodshed corner. I grunted with it to just below the window and a second later was standing on it, working frantically. If I could pry the window open even a crack, I could maybe slide it open far enough to squeeze myself through.
Standing on the cement block, I could see the coil of rope. I saw I could reach it even without climbing in, if I could get the window open far enough.
But even before I’d worked a minute, I realized I’d never get it open that way. The old man had painted the trim and the ledge. There had been a lot of rain lately, and it was swollen shut tighter than if it had been glued.
Even before I did what I knew I was going to have to do, I wrestled with my conscience about how much it would cost to put in a new pane of glass. Also in my mind was the thought that Old Man Paddler had entrusted his place to us to look after. It was an honor to be trusted like that when, all over the coun
try, so many boys were acting as if they didn’t have good sense, breaking into vacant houses and into homes when people were away, stealing and destroying property, and doing a lot of what the newspapers and police called vandalism.
What you’re going to do is not vandalism, my good sense told me. And you can save enough out of your allowance to pay for a new pane for the window.
The heavy stick I’d picked up went against the window glass.
Crash!
A few more quick strokes with the club took several jagged pieces of broken glass out of the way of my arm, and I was ready to reach in for the rope.
The wind caught at me so hard then that it took my breath away. Trees were swaying, and the water pail at the old man’s spring blew off the table there and went rolling and bouncing across the open space toward the cabin, where it hit against the porch.
Well, it just didn’t make sense that I wasn’t tall enough even on the cement block to reach in and get the rope, but that was the way it was.
I looked around. I had to have a box or something bigger to stand on, and I saw one over on the nearby hillside all by itself. I left the window, made a dash for the box, and stood stock-still when I saw that it was one of the old man’s beehives. He had a half-dozen hives all over the countryside on different people’s farms where there were fields of clover and lots of other flowers for making honey.
But there was another cement block behind the hive. I worked it loose out of the ground and rolled it and carried it down to the woodshed. I set it on top of the first one, stepped up, thrust my arm through, felt around for the rope, and grabbed it.
Then I was off like a streak, panting and hoping and quoting the second part of the Bible verse on prayer, the part that said, “Seek, and you will find.” I had asked, and God had answered, but He had put the answer where I had to look for it and work for it.
Swish, rush, hurry, run like a deer—over fallen logs again, swerving around brush piles again, dodging low-hanging tree branches, clambering up steep slopes. Last year’s fallen leaves made a crunching sound under my feet, and, overhead, dark clouds scowled down at me. Most of the time it was a race against the wind, which I knew would be blowing harder than ever up where the gang was.
Had it already begun to rain away up in the hills far above and beyond the haunted house?
It seemed to take me twice as long to get back as it had to get to the woodshed in the first place. When I finally arrived, gasping and panting, the wind was wilder than ever. Big Jim and Elsie were still on the narrow ledge a few feet from Stubtail’s lair. Below them, Circus was still on the outcropping, half lying down and half sitting astride the twisted juniper trunk.
“What on earth took you so long?” Poetry asked. “You had time enough to go clear home!”
I wasn’t in any mood to be scolded when I had been—it seemed to me—a pretty smart boy and especially when it seemed that with the very special answer to my very special prayer I had been alone with God somewhere, doing everything just right.
I didn’t even bother to answer. I was getting the rope ready to throw it across.
“Stop!” I was astonished to hear Elsie call out to me. “If you miss, it’ll be lost, and then what will we do?”
I stopped with my arm behind me, about to throw the coil of rope in my hand. It was heavy, I realized, and what if I didn’t toss it far enough?
I looked to Big Jim now, backed against the cliff wall, his hands clinging to a crevice, his shirt sleeves flapping in the wind. “How can I get it to you?” I asked.
His answer didn’t make good sense at first. “Tie your end of the rope to that little elm sapling behind you!”
“Do what?” I yelled back, astonished. How in the world could my tying one end of the rope to a sapling on my side of the gorge get the whole rope across to the other side?
In a few seconds, though, he had shouted a little good sense into my right-that-minute dull mind. I was to tie my end to the elm, wind the rest of the rope into a coil, and then toss the coil across.
The reason? It was as simple as two and two always make four, even if they are added by a thickheaded boy! If my toss wasn’t far enough or hard enough, the whole rope wouldn’t land down in the bottom of the ravine on Alexander the Coppersmith’s first grave!
Its end secured to the elm behind me, the rope was flying through the air with the greatest of ease toward Big Jim and Elsie, more than twenty feet across from me.
But only toward. Not to. My throw wasn’t hard enough or far enough. The wind, which could toss a kite on high and blow the birds about the sky as it says in one of Poetry’s poems, blew against the rope, and it was almost three feet short of reaching the other side. It unwound fast and wound up in a long, straight line below us. It was, I noticed, almost long enough to reach the bottom. If it was that long from our side, it’d be that long from Big Jim’s. That was good.
I pulled it back up and tried again. And again. And again. Each time, it wound up unwound thirty feet below us.
I saw Elsie’s set face, her left hand holding her right, and the scared look in her eyes, like a rabbit’s when it’s caught in a boy’s snare and is waiting for the boy to decide whether to kill it or loosen the snare and let it go free.
“It’s raining!” Little Jim cried, but I could hardly hear him for the clap of thunder that exploded in my ears at the same time. I could feel the rain, though, and I could hear the wind in the trees.
Circus yelled up to Big Jim then, “You can pull it across! Get my bow and arrow and shoot the arrow to the other side! It’s got fifty feet of kite string on the drinking-cup spool. The string’s fastened to the arrowhead and at the nock. Shoot it across to Bill. He can tie the rope to it, and you pull it across!”
And that is what Big Jim did.
The arrow from Circus’s homemade bow-fishing outfit whizzed past us, landing about ten feet behind me. As quickly as I could, I tied one end of the rope to it, and in even less time than it takes me to write it for you, Big Jim had pulled the rope across to where he and Elsie were.
Seeing the rope stretched all the way across gave Dragonfly another idea. “Now we’ve got a rope ladder! It would be quicker to come across hand over hand than to let yourself down hand over hand and have to climb all the way back up again on our side!”
For two minutes that seemed like seventeen, we argued back and forth about what to do now. The more we talked and worried, the more time was passing.
It was Elsie’s bandaged hand that decided for us. She couldn’t swing herself across. Maybe Big Jim could make a noose for her foot and by wrapping the other end of the rope around the juniper could ease her down, but what if she couldn’t hold on long enough?
Dragonfly, who was always coming up with ideas we couldn’t use, came up with one right then. “If we had a real ladder, and if it was long enough, you could cross on that!”
Poetry heard him and scoffed, “Even if we had one, how could you get it stretched from here to there?”
And that’s when that spindle-legged, crooked-nosed, sneezy little guy showed that he did have a bright mind even if he didn’t use it most of the time. “They could pull it across. We’d fasten our end of the rope to the top end of the ladder, and all they’d have to do is just pull it across.”
“We don’t have any ladder!” I countered.
That’s when Elsie surprised us by saying, “Why don’t you use the ladder at the cabin?”
“What ladder at the cabin?” Poetry exclaimed.
And my mind exclaimed the same thing. As many times as we’d visited the old man, we’d never seen any ladder except a very old stepladder, which wasn’t more than six feet tall. Elsie had probably seen that when she was there.
“That old stepladder wouldn’t even reach halfway!” I said across to her, and I was right.
But I was also wrong, because she called, “There’s a long one around in the back! I used it to climb onto the back porch roof!” Even as she said it, I noticed she
was swaying a little as though she was dizzy.
Well, I knew the old man’s six-foot stepladder certainly wasn’t long enough for anybody to use to climb up onto his high back porch roof. “You sure there was another ladder there?” I asked her.
“Sure I’m sure.”
And that, my mind told me, was the only answer. If there was a ladder there—a long enough one, and if it was light enough to carry—it was our last chance. Something else was in my mind, also, and it was Seek, and you will find. Maybe the rope I’d fought my way down to the cabin to get had been only part of the way to save Elsie. The ladder was the other part.
“You’d better hurry!” she cried worriedly.
That’s when I noticed that she was holding her right hand with her left again. Then she swayed, staggered toward the edge of the ledge, and sank down. Big Jim went quickly to her and grasped her arm.
“She’s f–f–fainted!” Little Jim stammered.
I tried to remember what I knew about the way rabies worked, but I wasn’t sure what kind of symptoms came next after the pain where she had the bite. In my memory there was something about the patient not being able to stand loud sounds and his voice getting husky and it being hard to swallow. There was also shortness of breath and foaming at the mouth and paralysis.
One thing I did know was that her voice wasn’t husky, and there wasn’t any sticky-looking saliva on her lips. At least I couldn’t see any.
Big Jim dragged her back from the rim of the ledge where she had fallen and into the hollow in the cliff wall.
And right then the storm really struck. The wind and thunder and lightning, which for quite a while had been getting worse, all of a sudden broke loose as if nature had gone mad. It was as if it had made up its mind that a gang of boys trying to save the life of a runaway girl hadn’t any right to even try it. Maybe the girl who had climbed out her home window at midnight and gone on a wild ride and whammed into a bridge and killed two teenagers and sent another to the hospital had to be punished for what she had done.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 31-36 Page 33