Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 31-36

by Paul Hutchens

  He stopped, gulped, and—well, that’s how I found out the real secret. Anybody who knows Little Jim knows he is maybe the best Christian boy in the whole Sugar Creek territory and that he had made the same kind of promise to God that I had—to read from the Bible and pray every day of his life.

  Do you know what? That wonderful little guy’s secret was this: he was praying a special prayer for Wandering Winnie to be found and brought back. This is the way he wound up explaining it to me: “I promised that if I do get her back, I’ll trade her for a Korean orphan.”

  Well, my mind flew back to the sermon we’d had in our church the week before. Our pastor had told us that anybody could “adopt” his own orphan for only fifty dollars a year.

  Also, I remembered Dad’s prayer that very morning when he had said, “And help us to do what we can about the hungry orphans over there.”

  Imagine! That wonderful, cute, littlest member of our gang was willing to trade his orphaned calf for an orphaned human being! The little dogie he liked almost as much as he would a little brother—he not having any brother to love or play with.

  “But it’s no use to pray for her now. Not if she’s already dead,” he said with a smothered sob in his voice.

  He swallowed as if there was a lump in his throat, then gave his head a quick toss to get the tears out of his eyes. That was the way he nearly always did it, so that nobody would see his tears and think he was a girl or just a little kid who cried easily.

  Back inside the Pop Shop we went, where I bought Little Jim a bottle of his favorite soda and stood studying the two mottos on the south wall of the shop. They said:

  DON’T SWEAR!

  I HONOR THE NAME

  YOU TAKE IN VAIN.

  and

  IF YOU EXPECT TO RATE

  AS A GENTLEMAN,

  DO NOT EXPECTORATE

  ON THE FLOOR.

  Poetry, who had his flash camera with him, hanging by a strap around his neck, took two or three pictures of the wall mottos as different members of the gang stood under them. He took one of me with a bottle of pop going down my throat, while I looked toward the ceiling.

  Then he and I went outside and moseyed around a little, walking in and out and round and round the square the way most of the rest of the people were doing. While we walked, we talked and kept our eyes and ears open to see if we could see anybody that looked like a calf-napper.

  By the time we came back to the Pop Shop, the rest of the gang had left and were maybe walking round and round and in and out as we had been doing. And then is when Poetry grabbed me by the arm and pulled me back around the Pop Shop corner, hissing, “There she is! That’s her!”

  I quick looked where the jerk of his head told me to and saw a square-shaped woman in brown pants swinging along toward us. She was holding a cigarette with one hand and eating a candy bar with the other. When the plodding, square-shaped woman reached the corner where we’d been just before we’d darted around it, she made a sharp turn the other way.

  Then she started on a catty-cornered stride toward the park and the gravel walk we knew went through the park to a part of town where there were a few empty store buildings and an abandoned blacksmith shop. There, before there had been automobiles, all the farmers from all over everywhere took their horses to get them fitted with new horseshoes. People didn’t take their horses there anymore but their worn-out or wrecked automobiles. There were maybe thirty-five cars and trucks in a large lot by the old blacksmith shop.

  There was a lamppost at the entrance of the park. After that, the path was dark all the way through. The town council had voted to put lights along the winding path but had not done it yet on account of what is called “politics,” my father had told my mother one night last week, and I had overheard it.

  Anyway, several seconds and maybe seven steps before the woman disappeared into the park, walking slowly and whistling some kind of tune, she finished all the cigarette she wanted to and flicked the stub toward the lamppost, where it fell and rolled a few feet to a smoking stop in the gravel walk.

  Poetry and I must have had the same idea. As soon as she was gone, we hurried as fast as we could, without seeming to be hurrying, over to the light. There I stooped as though I was going to tie one of my shoes. Actually I did untie and tie it again, and while I was that close to the ground, I saw a green-tipped cigarette stub with red lipstick on the end of the filter.

  Wow!

  When you are for sure on the trail of a calf-napper who has stolen and butchered your best friend’s prize baby beef, stuffed its red hide and white head in a burlap bag, and tossed it into the quicksand of the Sugar Creek swamp—I say, when you are absolutely sure you are on the trail of the calf-napper, what do you do?

  Poetry decided for us, saying, “Let’s take the shortcut to the bridge and hide behind the spirea there and take her picture!”

  Before I could have said no even if I had wanted to, I took off after him in a fast run across the dark park and past a sign that said Keep Off the Grass, which we were going to keep off of as soon as we could.

  Two fast boys can outrun a strolling woman any day, so we were crouching behind the spirea bush maybe two minutes before we heard her feet coming toward us on the gravel walk.

  It was a tense minute. We didn’t even dare whisper, or one or the other might say, “Shh!” That shush might be louder than the whisper, and we might miss getting the woman’s picture.

  Right then Poetry did shush me, though, for the pinkish white flowers of the spirea bush made me sneeze.

  Now we could really hear her heavy steps. In another very few seconds she would be at the bridge, the bulb of Poetry’s flash camera would explode in her face, and we’d have the picture we wanted.

  Crunch … crunch … crunch …

  Nearer and nearer and still nearer those steps came.

  And then—just when she was close enough for Poetry to quickly stand up, spring out onto the walk, and take the picture—there was a stealthy movement behind the spirea on the other side of the walk, not more than fifteen feet from us, as though somebody else was waiting there.

  In that spine-tingling second, Poetry pressed his camera button.

  In that split second of on-and-off-again blinding light, I saw a big, husky man as block-shaped as the woman. He had a long, bushy, reddish brown beard and was bareheaded. Poetry had taken a picture of a woman and a man.

  “Quick! Under the bridge!” Poetry ordered.

  We ducked down the steep embankment. But then we had to stop, because the place where the Gang sometimes used to sit in the shade on a hot summer day and talk and tell stories, eat candy bars, and make plans and stuff—the place was full of hissing, fast-flowing water from the afternoon’s rainstorm!

  Well, Poetry’s flashbulb must have stirred up the man’s temper. His beard-bordered mouth was spouting some of the filthiest words a boy ever heard. Also, he had a flashlight and was shining it all around in fast circles, trying to spot us.

  It seemed like the right time to do what Poetry just then ordered us to do, which was, “Run for your life!”

  And we did—each one running for his own life—not back toward the lights of Main Street, which was a lot farther, but across the bridge toward the other side of the park, where it seemed it would be easy to lose ourselves among the old abandoned cars and trucks.

  It was ridiculous at such a scary time to be thinking about a story we had in our school reader. But while we were running for our lives and the flashlight of the red-bearded man was trying to focus on us, making it hard for us to keep out of his sight, and while his curses were still in my ears, I was thinking about Peter Rabbit running for his life with the hot-tempered Mr. McGregor chasing him.

  I was also remembering the wall motto in the Pop Shop that said DO NOT SWEAR! I HONOR THE NAME YOU TAKE IN VAIN.

  And it seemed that maybe the wickedest thing a person could do was to use the Creator’s Name the way the red-bearded man was doing it.


  We darted into the abandoned car lot and worked our way along a row of oldish Fords, Buicks, Chevies, and other makes. As soon as we thought it was safe, we stopped, panting and listening.

  “They’ve got to be here somewhere,” I heard the woman’s husky voice say and then heard the man’s guttural answer, “Let ’em go! Maybe they didn’t take a picture. Maybe that was just a flashlight.”

  A second later, they passed us and began looking farther along.

  “Now,” Poetry whispered in my ear, “let’s hide in the blacksmith shop. We can climb in through the back window.”

  It was a good idea, except that we hadn’t figured on the front fender of somebody’s old car to be lying in the way and two boys stumbling over it.

  Clankety-rattlety-clatter!

  Down we went and up we got, with Mr. and Mrs. McGregor after us again!

  “I saw them run toward the blacksmith shop!” I heard the woman say, and we knew that even if we could get there and inside, we would be like two rats in a trap.

  Spotting a pickup truck in the alley leading to the blacksmith shop, we scooted across a shadowy place, ducked around to the back of it, and, because we had to have a place to hide, quick climbed up into the truck bed. We crouched low, panting and holding our breath. And even in the middle of what could be real danger, I was still thinking of Mr. McGregor and Peter Rabbit—Peter jumping up and in and hiding inside a tall sprinkler can.

  As quiet as two scared-half-to-death mice with a hungry cat after them, we waited and listened. We hoped the red-bearded man and the woman would go away so that we could spring out and make a beeline back across the park to Main Street—to where the rest of the gang were and where the picture Poetry had taken could be left with the Pop Shop owner for developing.

  Right then I began to have a hard time with my olfactory nerves. I was crouched on what seemed to be a pile of empty gunnysacks. They smelled as if they had had bran shorts in them, and I had to fight off a noisy sneeze by pressing my fingers against my upper lip under my nose.

  Then a light turned on in my mind as I realized for sure what I was smelling—a gunnysack like the kind that right that very second had a calf’s hide and head in it and was lying at the edge of the quagmire in the Sugar Creek swamp!

  “You smell what I smell?” I whispered to Poetry, but he shushed me.

  I kept on fighting a want-to sneeze.

  The tense seconds dragged past as if they were minutes, while we waited and listened and smelled and wondered why things were so quiet all of a sudden.

  A moment later, we found out. A car went past on the park’s back street, and a spotlight from the car cut through the darkness, its long shaft searching all around.

  Poetry hissed in my ear, “The sheriff’s after them!”

  It might have been a good time for us to leap out of the pickup and start running and yelling and crying, “Help! Help!”

  But before I had time to think such a fast, worried thought, the sheriff’s car went on. To yell now would be to let the red-bearded man and the stocky woman, who was maybe his wife, know where we were. Two boys would be caught in a pickup instead of in a blacksmith’s shop, and we’d probably get the living daylights knocked out of us.

  Then is when we heard footsteps running in our direction and heard the two doors of our truck open and close.

  A split second later the motor started, the truck leaped forward, and we shot out of that alley like thunder on wheels. The truck swung into Park Road, skidded around a corner, and headed for the moonlit country.

  What on earth in a pickup truck—and why?

  And also, where to?

  6

  What a ride!

  One thing was for sure: our pickup wasn’t any old worn-out truck somebody had left in the wrecker’s junkyard. They had only parked it there because it was a good hiding place. The pickup had a powerful motor, and it was being driven at one of the fastest speeds I’d ever ridden in my life.

  It wouldn’t be safe for us to jump out. A boy could get killed jumping out of a fast-moving car. The only thing we could do that was safe was to lie quiet and wait for the truck to stop. Then maybe we could get out, and if we were in any part of the territory we knew, we could find our way back to town or to one of our houses and phone the sheriff or the police.

  I was still smelling bran shorts and gunny-sacks and thinking about Wandering Winnie. Poetry and I kept on lying with our heads close to each other’s so we could say anything we thought it was safe to say.

  “Know where we are?” Poetry said into one of my ears.

  And I answered, “We’re on pavement yet. I think we’re on the road that goes past the church—and the cemetery,” I added, thinking one of the saddest thoughts a boy ever thinks.

  Faster and faster, it seemed, we flew along that paved highway.

  “We’re going downhill now,” Poetry said, and almost at the same time there was a rattle-bangety-bang clattering noise as the wheels of the car went flying across a wooden-floored bridge.

  Now I knew for sure where we were. The only wooden-floored bridge left in the county was the one that crossed Wolf Creek at the foot of the hill below the church.

  On and on and still on. And hurry and worry and wonder and wait and hope. That was all that was going on in my mind.

  Yet not quite all. I should have guessed we weren’t the only passengers in the back of that pickup. Ever since we had plopped ourselves in, I had been having a hard time with my olfactory nerves. I had been smelling not only bran shorts, which cows and calves like to eat so well, but something else.

  I found out what when I reached over to touch Poetry on the shoulder so that I could get his attention and tell him something. My hand missed his shoulder and slipped through a crack in a crate that was standing between us and the truck’s cab. And what with my wandering hand did I feel but the warm hair and hide of something alive!

  At the same time, I heard a sound that was not the roaring motor or the flying tires of the pickup we were in. It was the half-smothered bawl of a calf. I say “smothered,” because it was the kind of a bawl a cow or calf makes when it doesn’t open its mouth but lets the sound come out through its nose.

  Now I knew for sure we were on the trail of a calf-napper. I told Poetry what I had just thought.

  And he said back, “Not just calf-nappers, but boy-nappers! We’re being stolen, too, you know!”

  Already our truck was up the hill on the other side of the board-floored bridge and moving fast toward the area that was the playground of the Sugar Creek Gang. It was near to where we all lived and not far from the lane that leads to the creek, the sycamore tree, the cave, and the swamp.

  Then Poetry muttered in my ear a plan his mind had just come up with. “When they stop to butcher this one, we’ll jump out before they do and hide. While they’re actually skinning it, we’ll snap another picture, then run like lightning for whoever’s house we’re nearest to and phone the sheriff.”

  It was a good plan—or would have been if our captors had driven past our house and on toward the lane that leads toward the swamp. But they didn’t.

  Instead, when they came to the lane that angled off toward Little Jim’s house, they swung into it, and the pickup picked up speed as they sped us on a jouncety-shakety-bumpety-bump-bump ride along the edge of our south pasture.

  At a time like that you can’t think straight, but because you have to keep still, you do it, though every drop of blood in your body is tingling with wondering what will happen next.

  On my right, across our south pasture, I could see my house, where I knew there was a phone, and which I was planning to run to and use as soon as I had a chance.

  Any minute, I thought, we’d come to wherever they had butchered Little Jim’s Wandering Winnie. There the truck would slow down, swing off into the woods, and the butchering of another calf would begin.

  But I thought wrong. We kept going right on until we came to the wide-spreading maple tree that shaded t
he gate at Little Jim’s house! There our captors turned in and stopped right beside Little Jim’s yard gate, not far from their summer kitchen and the side porch of their house.

  If Poetry and I were going to get out of the pickup without being seen, now was the time.

  Talk about fast movements. Two boys—a red-haired slender one and a blondish round one—were up and out of that pickup’s wagon box in less time than it takes me to write it and were scooting for a hiding place behind the lilacs at the side of the house.

  Peering through the lilac leaves, I saw the woman open the truck door on her side and, with a flashlight in her hand, hurry toward the Footes’ porch. Then I heard her knock at the door.

  At the same time Poetry was whispering in my ear a plan of some kind, which, because my mind was divided, I could hardly hear. Part of what I did hear was, “You wait here with the camera until I get back and yell, ‘Now!’ Then snap the picture.”

  With that, he handed the camera to me and took off along the row of lilac shrubs that bordered the house, leaving me wondering what on earth. What he was going to do, I didn’t have the least idea, on account of not hearing his plan. But I did know how to use his flash camera, so I waited in a cringing crouch to see what would happen and to snap the picture whenever he ordered me to.

  When nobody answered the woman’s knock, which nobody could because nobody was home, the woman knocked again.

  I said, “Nobody could,” but I was wrong. Right that very second the door did open a crack and somebody did answer, and believe it or not, it was good old Poetry, asking, “Yes? Who’s there?”

  I guess maybe every member of the Sugar Creek Gang knew like an open book the inside of the house of every other member. That’s why Poetry could race around Little Jim’s house, slip in the back door, and find his way through to the front door so fast.

  That, I thought, was the plan he had whispered in my ear a few fast minutes ago.

  “We’re looking for James Foote,” the woman with the flashlight said, though I could hardly hear her for the noise of the pickup’s motor still running in the drive. “We saw your ad in the paper and decided the calf that had strayed onto our place was yours. We have it here in the truck.”