Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 31-36

by Paul Hutchens

  As I swung into Poetry’s yard, I strained my eyes in the direction of the creek and saw through the trees a flash of red and knew it was the gang, bringing Elsie.

  I leaned my bike against Poetry’s white picket fence beside their gate and yelled, “Hurry up! The doctor’ll be here any minute!”

  That’s when I noticed they were pulling my red wagon.

  I thought, Good old Gang! They’re bringing Mom’s birthday present too. It won’t be too late after all! Then I said out loud, “How in the world did they get it through the cave? They couldn’t get it through!”

  And that’s when I saw there wasn’t any cute little evergreen pyramid standing in a gunny-sacked ball of dirt in the wagon box. Instead, there was a red suitcase and a red blouse and a red pair of pants with a girl in them, riding along as if she was a queen and the gang was a five-horse team!

  As soon as they were near enough for me to be heard, I called, “What did you do with Mom’s birthday present?”

  “EIsie has a sprained ankle,” Big Jim reminded me, “so we let her ride. We took your tree out, put it in the shade, and poured a pail of water on the roots so it’d be safe to transplant tomorrow. We’ll all go back and get it. We carried the wagon through the cave. We can do that on our way up tomorrow, too, to save time.”

  Forgetting for a second the most important thing—getting Elsie taken care of—I blurted out, “Yeah, but that’ll be too late. Mom’s birthday is today! I promised Dad I’d have it set out for her by the time he brought her home from Memory City.”

  What I’d just said seemed to bother Elsie. Maybe I made her feel sad because she had upset somebody’s plan for a birthday surprise. She grimaced, shifted her position in the wagon, and said to me, “I’m sorry. I’m always spoiling everything for everybody!” I saw her swallow hard as if she had a lump in her throat and maybe an ache in her heart.

  That is, that’s what I thought it was at first. Then I remembered the rabies and got a scared feeling. That was another symptom of a patient getting hydrophobia. Along with a husky voice, it began to be hard to swallow. I was ashamed of myself for even mentioning the tree. Even though it was important, it wasn’t half as important as saving Elsie.

  This was the first time I’d had a good chance to look at her face, and do you know what? It didn’t look at all like the face of a girl who was supposed to be such a bad girl.

  Just when it seemed I’d better go in and call the doctor again to see if he had left, there was the sound of a car in the lane, and it was an ambulance with Dr. Gordon, another doctor, and a nurse. If it wasn’t already too late, Elsie’s life was going to be saved.

  “Look!” Little Jim cried. “There’s a rainbow! A double one!”

  I think maybe I’d seen the rainbow myself but had had too much else on my mind to notice it especially. I cast a glance toward the northeastern sky and saw a wide arc spreading all the way across. It had all the colors of the spectrum with the red at the top of the arc, which is always the way it is in what is called a “primary” rainbow. The “secondary” rainbow wasn’t half as bright as the smaller one but was maybe one of the brightest I’d ever seen with the red color on the inside edge, which also is the way it always is.

  There was some fast action around us as the doctors took over. In only a few minutes they had Elsie in the ambulance and were about to drive away when there was a whirring sound in the sky. Swooping toward us out of the northwest from the direction of Turkey Run State Park was the helicopter.

  Elsie, whose face I kept watching, looked startled and terribly worried. “It’s my father!” she cried. “Don’t start yet! Wait till he lands! There’s something I have to tell him!”

  There soon was not only fast action around Poetry’s wide barnyard but there was sad action too. The short, red-haired father with a grim face and a tearful voice cried, and Elsie cried with him. He told her how sorry he was that he hadn’t been a good father, and she begged him not to worry. She said that she’d be all right and that she loved him and that she shouldn’t have run away.

  At first her father wanted them to rush Elsie to the hospital in the helicopter. They could go swinging high over the hills and trees, cut across fields and roads, and get there twice as fast. The hospital was more than fifteen miles away at the county seat.

  “She needs treatment right now,” Dr. Gordon explained when he said no to Elsie’s father. “We have everything she needs right here in the ambulance. We’ll ride along and look after her on the way. I’ve phoned the hospital, and they’ll have a bed ready.”

  It was pitiful—especially Elsie’s worried face—when she asked the nurse, “Am I going to die?”

  I didn’t get to hear the answer, but whatever it was, it seemed Elsie believed it.

  It was decided that her father could ride with the ambulance driver. The helicopter pilot, who had a flying service in Parke County and had been hired to help in the search, had finished his work and could fly back home.

  Whew! What an afternoon!

  It had been one of the most exciting afternoons of my whole life, and I was ready for a letdown. The only thing was, I couldn’t let up. I still had the chores to do at home. And even though I had the best excuse in the world for not having the work done between the cherry trees, I hated to think of how disappointed Dad would be. We’d never be able to make it now—not even if we ran all the way to the cave, carried the wagon through, set Mom’s birthday present in it, and pulled it as fast as we could back through the swamp.

  I looked down at my empty wagon and heard myself actually sniffling as though I was little and had had a big disappointment and was about to cry.

  Big Jim spoke then, and I noticed his voice sounded like a boy a lot older than he was. He said, “She was a nice girl. If she’d had a chance—if her mother loved the Lord Jesus, she would’ve loved Elsie too and wouldn’t have spent her time in taverns. And if Elsie’s father was a Christian, too, maybe he would’ve been home more, and they all would’ve been happy. If it were like that, maybe she wouldn’t have wanted to run away from home.”

  I wasn’t at all surprised to hear Poetry answer Big Jim, saying, “For want of a home, a daughter was lost!”

  I guessed maybe Elsie had told the gang different things about herself when they’d been bringing her through the cave and all the way to Poetry’s house. I also guessed that Big Jim and maybe the rest of the gang had talked a lot to Elsie, telling her about our having the Lord Jesus as our Savior and how He died for us and for her too.

  Then Big Jim said right out plain and clear that my guesses were right. He grinned and told us that Elsie had believed in the Lord Jesus while they were still on the ledge and the rest of us were off getting the ladder.

  Just then, the helicopter motor started. In a few minutes the giant whirlybird would take off. Then we’d be alone again with only each other, a red wagon, and, in the northeast, a rainbow that reminded us that God was still on His throne and would be forever, just as He had promised Noah in the Bible right after the big Flood.

  “All right, boys! Let’s get going!” the helicopter pilot called.

  “Get going where?” I called back to him and was astonished at his answer.

  “We can get your tree and bring it back in time to set it where you want it for your mother’s birthday present!”

  How in the world did he know about the present?

  I asked and found out that Elsie had told her father, and her father had told the pilot, and everything had already been planned. In a second, in spite of the worry in my heart for Elsie Mayfield, I felt as light as a feather.

  There wouldn’t be room enough in the whirlybird for all the gang and the tree, but there would be for Poetry, Little Jim, and me. That was the way it was decided as, half scared, we hurried to the helicopter to climb in and take our first whirlybird ride, high, high, and extrahigh above all the Sugar Creek territory up to Old Man Paddler’s cabin and back again. If we really hurried, we’d have the cute little py
ramidal blue spruce set and growing and I’d be out gathering the eggs when Dad and Mom came driving through the gate.

  Boy oh boy, you ought to see Sugar Creek from away up in the air! The feeling I had as we swung out over the trees, the fields, and the creek itself, which was like a silver ribbon threading its way through the countryside below us, was a little like the way I’d felt a few years ago when I had gotten my first bicycle and was pedaling down the road on it.

  The wind had been in my face that day too, and the flowers and weeds and trees flew past on either side. The only difference was that today I was almost half a mile high, and this time I didn’t lose my balance and tumble out and bump my shins and my chin and get my knees all scratched up as I did on my bike.

  In only a few minutes, we were landing in the open space between Old Man Paddler’s cabin and his spring, just a short way from Tennyson’s brook.

  In another few minutes we had the soaking wet, gunnysack-balled, cute little blue spruce in the helicopter and again were up, up, up, and still up, making a wide sweep out over the swamp and heading for the Collins barnyard.

  Little Jim said something as he sat beside me in the whirlybird that I knew I would never forget as long as I lived. He had both hands clasped around my right arm at the time, since there wasn’t very much in a helicopter cab for a boy to hold onto.

  The pilot had his eyes glued to his business, and Poetry, on the other side of Little Jim, was talking up to him about which controls did what, so I was the only one to hear what maybe was the nicest thing in the world for anybody to say.

  Little Jim didn’t say it to me, though, but to the happy-looking little tree in front of him. This is what he said: “Listen, little tree. Don’t you worry! And you don’t need to be afraid even a little bit. You’re just being transplanted. You’re going to live in another place, and the Collins yard is as good a heaven as any tree could wish for!”

  Then he settled back, leaned his small face against my arm, sighed, and said, “I sure am glad that Elsie is a Christian now, but I hope she doesn’t get transplanted yet. You think maybe she will?”

  I didn’t have the least idea that Poetry had heard Little Jim’s question, but he must have because he answered him. “Not yet, anyway. I heard Dr. Gordon tell the nurse they’d gotten to her just in time.”

  Then my heart did feel light. There wasn’t a thing in the world to worry about, not one single thing.

  Beside me, Little Jim came to life with a cheerful remark, saying, “There’s the rainbow again! How come it’s in the south now?”

  But it wasn’t. He had only gotten his directions mixed from whirling around in the whirly-bird.

  For a few seconds I studied the fading rainbow, thinking how nice it would be if a boy could see a rainbow no matter what direction he was looking. Imagining what our minister might say if I told him what I had just thought, it seemed maybe he would answer, “You can, Bill, if you’re looking up to God at the same time.”

  Our minister might say that. I’m pretty sure Mom would, if I happened to tell her.

  I pulled my thoughts back inside the helicopter then to listen to something Poetry wanted to tell us. “How come nobody asks the detective about one of the most important clues in the red shoe mystery?” he asked.

  “Everything’s all solved,” I answered him. “We know how she ran away, why she did it, where the red shoes came from, and—well, what else is there?”

  “This,” Poetry answered as he took from his shirt pocket the folded piece of newspaper from the classified section of the Indianapolis News. He spread it out on his lap so that Little Jim and I could read it.

  I had forgotten about the paper, and I admitted it to Poetry. “But it’s not important anymore,” I said.

  “But it is,” he countered. “We know how she ran away and why she did it, but we didn’t know where she was going. That is, we didn’t know until I happened to see this. Read it!”

  I leaned over, feeling my safety belt tighten from leaning across Little Jim. Poetry’s finger was pointing to a want ad that had an almost invisible pencil mark underlining it, and this is what I read:

  Unusual opportunity for teenage girls with plenty of personality. Travel, make money, get away from boredom.

  As soon as Poetry was sure I had read the ad, he said, “My mother read a story about mothers and daughters one day last month. The story said every mother should warn her daughter never to answer an ad like that.”

  “Yeah,” Little Jim said. He’d also been reading. “But what if the girl’s mother doesn’t care? What if she’s like Elsie’s mother?”

  When he said that, I thought how my own cute little sister, Charlotte Ann, would grow pretty fast from now on. It seemed I ought to be glad she had Mom for her mother and that we had a whole family that belonged to God’s family and loved Him and each other.

  Below me now, I could see the walnut tree, the brown roof of our house, the green ivy that almost covered the window of my upstairs room, and the barnyard, where we were going to land in another few minutes.

  And out on the west side of the house was a long pink row of hollyhocks, marching from the henhouse to a place halfway between the two cherry trees. By straining my eyes a little, I could see a mound of earth and, beside it, a hole in the ground just the right size to hold a birthday present for one of the best mothers in the whole world.

  The Sugar Creek Gang Series:

  The Swamp Robber

  The Killer Bear

  The Winter Rescue

  The Lost Campers

  The Chicago Adventure

  The Secret Hideout

  The Mystery Cave

  Palm Tree Manhunt

  One Stormy Day

  The Mystery Thief

  Teacher Trouble

  Screams in the Night

  The Indian Cemetery

  The Treasure Hunt

  Thousand Dollar Fish

  The Haunted House

  Lost in the Blizzard

  On the Mexican Border

  The Green Tent Mystery

  The Bull Fighter

  The Timber Wolf

  Western Adventure

  The Killer Cat

  The Colorado Kidnapping

  The Ghost Dog

  The White Boat Rescue

  The Brown Box Mystery

  The Watermelon Mystery

  The Trapline Thief

  The Blue Cow

  Treehouse Mystery

  The Cemetery Vandals

  The Battle of the Bees

  Locked in the Attic

  Runaway Rescue

  The Case of Missing Calf

  Paul Hutchens

  MOODY PUBLISHERS

  CHICAGO

  © 1964, 1999 by

  PAULINE HUTCHENS WILSON

  Revised Edition, 1999

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  All Scripture quotations are taken from the New American Standard Bible, © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, and 1994 by The Lockman Foundation, La Habra, Calif. Used by permission.

  ISBN: 0-8024-7040-8

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8024-7040-9

  We hope you enjoy this book from Moody Publishers. Our goal is to provide high-quality, thought-provoking books and products that connect truth to your real needs and challenges. For more information on other books and products written and produced from a biblical perspective, go to www.moodypublishers.com or write to:

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  PREFACE

  Hi—from a member of the Sugar Creek Gang!

  It’s just that I don’t know which one I am. When I was good, I was Little Jim. When I did bad things—well, sometimes I
was Bill Collins or even mischievous Poetry.

  You see, I am the daughter of Paul Hutchens, and I spent many an hour listening to him read his manuscript as far as he had written it that particular day. I went along to the north woods of Minnesota, to Colorado, and to the various other places he would go to find something different for the Gang to do.

  Now the years have passed—more than fifty, actually. My father is in heaven, but the Gang goes on. All thirty-six books are still in print and now are being updated for today’s readers with input from my five children, who also span the decades from the ’50s to the ’70s.

  The real Sugar Creek is in Indiana, and my father and his six brothers were the original Gang. But the idea of the books and their ministry were and are the Lord’s. It is He who keeps the Gang going.

  PAULINE HUTCHENS WILSON

  1

  This was the third worried day since Wandering Winnie, Little Jim Foote’s white-faced Hereford calf, had disappeared. Though almost everybody in Sugar Creek territory had looked all over everywhere for her, nobody had seen hide nor hair of her. And as far as we knew, nobody had even heard her high-pitched, trembling bawl.

  Different ideas as to what could have happened to the cutest little calf a boy ever owned had been talked about and worried over by all six members of the Sugar Creek Gang and by our six sets of parents. My own parents were doing maybe as much or more worrying than the Foote family.