What a disappointment! All this time, I had thought we were riding in a cattle rustler’s pickup and that the man and woman were wicked people. Now, it seemed they were innocent ranchers, who lived somewhere in the territory. Wandering Winnie had wandered over to their place, and they were bringing her home again.
Poetry’s answer was as surprising as what the woman had just said. “I’m the only one here right now. But the folks ought to be home pretty soon. If you’ll just put the calf in the corral …”
“We came to claim the reward,” the woman said. “We’ll wait.”
Poetry’s voice had a doubt in it when he answered, “Are you sure you’ve got the right calf? Was it a white-faced Hereford?”
The woman’s answer was very polite as she said, “Of course! Come, take a look!”
While I waited, wondering what on earth was in Poetry’s mind—and how come everything had changed—that heavyset woman led Poetry to the pickup and shined her light on the crate in the truck bed. From as far away as I was, still looking through the lilac leaves, I saw a live, red-haired calf with an all-white face. I also saw that there was a muzzle on the calf so it wouldn’t be able to open its mouth and let out any long, high-pitched, trembling bawl as I’d heard Little Jim’s dumb dogie do so many times in the neighborhood.
Poetry, still pretending to be a member of the Foote family, took quite a while to climb up into the truck and out again. While he was there, using the woman’s flashlight, he examined Wandering Winnie’s face and neck and ears, like a mother looking over her son’s Saturday night bath.
When my detective-minded friend shuffled out of the truck, he said, “I’m satisfied. Maybe I can get the folks to come home right away. Wait a minute while I use the phone.” With that, Poetry started back to the house. But on the way, he circled the lilac and whispered to me his secret.
“It’s like I thought. That’s not Wandering Winnie. Winnie had a scar over her left eye where she got cut on the barbed-wire fence at your place. Remember?”
I remembered.
He whispered something else before going into the house to make the phone call. “I think they’re the thieves and they’ve stolen another calf just to get the reward. I’m going to phone the sheriff.”
It was a tense minute, I tell you, while I waited in the shadows and fought to keep from sneezing on account of the very fragrant flowers of the lilacs. The truck’s motor was still running and its lights still on, lighting up the Footes’ empty corral, where Wandering Winnie used to be kept. The woman was also using her flashlight, zigzagging it here and there across the lawn and then swinging it back to the house door again just in time to catch Poetry’s face as he came out.
“You’re to take the calf over to the Collinses. They’ll keep it there tonight in their corral. I’ll ride along and show you where.”
With that, Poetry started down the steps, stumbled over his feet, and rolled over a couple of times till he was behind the lilac bush where I was. “The phone’s out of order,” he whispered to me. “We’ll have to stall for time. The minute we’re out of the drive, you beat it for your house and phone the sheriff to come there!”
Then he rolled onto his feet again and came up limping, saying, “I’ve got to fix that old step tomorrow morning.”
That thought was good thinking, because the bottom step of the porch did need fixing.
I knew for sure how keen a mind Poetry had, when, instead of the truck’s going back down the lane the way we had come—which would be the shortest way around to our house—they drove north toward the Sugar Creek School. To go that way would be almost two miles and at least five minutes farther.
If I ran like a cottontail with seventeen hounds after it, I could get to our house and in and have the sheriff’s office on the phone before Poetry and the rustlers with the calf could come driving up to “Theodore Collins” on our mailbox.
After that, we could stall them a little longer while they waited for James Foote to come with the reward money—which he wasn’t coming with—and we’d capture ourselves a couple of cattle rustlers.
Run … Run … Run … Pant … Pant … Pant … Hurry … Hurry … Hurry …
Across Little Jim’s lawn I flew, through their lawn gate, down the lane to the stile over which I went lickety-sizzle, through our melon patch, then past the twin pignut trees, and on to our barnyard. I had to get to the phone quick—real quick! Would I get there quick enough?
7
That was a good question. Would I be able to get home to our phone quick enough to get the sheriff called before Poetry, the rustlers, and the stolen calf would come driving up to “Theodore Collins” on our mailbox?
And after I called the sheriff, would he be able to drive from town fast enough to get to our house quick enough to arrest the rustlers before they got tired of waiting for James Foote, who wasn’t coming anyway?
Worrying wouldn’t help, I knew. But running would.
And so I ran—as I already told you—down the lane from Little Jim’s place all the way to the stile the gang used almost every day in fall, winter, and spring, going to and from school. Then I went up and over the stile.
With all that worry on my mind, it was ridiculous to remember the lady in our school-book who had so much trouble with a pig that wouldn’t go over a stile. But with every flying step, the words went racing along in my mind: “So he went a little further till he met a rat, and he said, ‘Rat, rat, gnaw rope, rope won’t hang butcher, butcher won’t kill ox, ox won’t drink water, water won’t put out fire, fire won’t burn stick, stick won’t beat dog, dog won’t bite pig, piggy won’t go over the stile, and I shan’t get home tonight. But the rat wouldn’t, so he went a little farther till he saw a cat …’”
And right then, I myself saw a cat. She was at the garden gate, waiting to catch a mouse maybe, and she went scooting ahead of me to the iron pitcher pump and on to the kitchen door—and I did get home that night.
I opened the screen, turned the doorknob to go in, and then remembered. Mom, who had been worried about people who steal calves right out of your backyard on your front doorstep, had locked the door, and the key was in town in her handbag!
Like a streak I was around the house to the front door, hoping it wouldn’t be locked. But it also was!
And now what on earth! I had to get inside to use the phone to call the sheriff.
Well, I knew where we kept the extra key, so I looked in the secret place no one outside our family is supposed to know. And …
The key began to turn the lock, the boy began to turn the knob, the door began to open, and the boy began to race for the phone where he began to take it off the hook to see if the party line was busy—and it was!
I mean it really was. Three or four women were talking and worrying to each other about all the excitement there was in the neighborhood. One of them said, “I’ve been trying to call the Footes all afternoon, ever since the storm, but their phone seems to be out of order.”
“Listen,” I called into our own phone. “I’ve got to have the line! I want to call the sheriff! We’re about to catch the cattle rustlers, and—”
But it wasn’t any use. One of the women said to another woman, “Whatever is coming over people nowadays! Trying to get the line by scaring people!”
My temper fired up good and hot right then, and I yelled into the phone, “Ladies, please! This is Bill Collins! I’ve got to call the sheriff!”
Even though it is maybe the hardest thing in the world to get a woman to stop talking to or listening to another woman, all of a sudden it seemed those two or three or four women did believe me, and they did all hang up, and I did call the sheriff, and the lady in the office said she would send out a message to the patrol car, wherever it was.
I quick hung up then, hurried outdoors to the front gate, and opened it for the truck with the rustlers, the calf, and Poetry to drive in when they got there.
Then, with the flash camera ready to shoot, I hid behind th
e yellow rosebush.
Any minute now, the pickup might come hurrying up the road. Would the rustlers get here before the sheriff? My own folks were probably looking all over town for me. Poetry’s folks would be doing the same thing for him. And hundreds of the rest of the people who were still in town would be still walking around and talking about things that didn’t amount to very much, while Poetry and I with the help of the sheriff were capturing the rustlers who had been stealing livestock right out of people’s backyards on their front doorsteps.
I saw the pickup’s lights coming from the direction of the north road corner before I heard its engine.
Boy oh boy!
Now they were slowing down at “Theodore Collins” on our mailbox.
Now they were turning in, making a cloud of white dust, and stopping in our drive beside the plum tree.
Now also, things—what seemed maybe a hundred things—began to happen fast.
Say, have you ever watched a football game when the players are scattered all over the field? One man has the ball and is running with it, and almost before you can say, “Jack Robinson,” half the men on both teams are all together in one place in a big pileup of legs and arms and helmets and grunts and groans, with the man with the ball somewhere under the whole pile!
That was the way things began to happen at the Theodore Collins place almost that very second. Down the road, shooting like a rocket with a flashing red light and a screeching siren came the sheriff’s car. Behind it came another car and another and another. Two or three cars came whizzing up from the other direction—which is why you never know what will happen when three or four women who are on the phone at the same time tell their husbands what they’ve just heard.
There hadn’t been so much grown-up excitement around our place in a long time.
From where I was in the moonlit dark, I could see Poetry in the pickup’s bed, standing behind and holding onto the crate with the calf in it. And then, as the pickup lunged forward, he lost his balance, went down in a tangle of arms and legs, and rolled out onto the ground in front of the sheriff’s car’s headlights.
And at that very second, Poetry yelled above the noise of all the cars, “Now! Get the picture!”
And I got it! I rushed out to where he was, stopped, took aim and shot, wondering at the same time what he wanted a picture of himself for, lying on the ground in front of the sheriff’s car, while the rustler’s pickup went roaring across our barnyard toward Lady MacBeth’s pasture bars.
Then the truck crashed into and through the bars and shot out into our south pasture, following the row of elderberry bushes that lined the fence.
Poetry rolled quickly out of the headlights of the sheriff’s car, and that car leaped forward after the pickup, its siren going full blast through our barnyard, giving chase to the truck with Wandering Winnie’s substitute in it.
For about seven minutes, more or less, there was a wild chase out there in our moonlit south pasture. The pickup was like a mouse in a house with a woman with a broom after it.
Then it headed back, its motor roaring, toward the pasture bars again. And that’s when the accident happened.
Whoever was driving the pickup must have been pretty nervous or scared, because, instead of zipping through the gate, it whammed into the big corner post Dad and I had set up earlier that summer, and there it came to a fender-and-grille-smashing stop.
The sheriff’s car, its spotlight lighting up the whole scene, screeched to its own stop right behind it. There were loud, sharp orders out there and threats, and the very nice man and woman who had only wanted to be kind to a boy who had lost his calf by bringing it home to him were captured.
It was nearly eleven o’clock before things quieted down at our house. The rustlers had been taken off to the county jail until it could be decided what to do with them. The neighbors who had heard me phone the sheriff and had come driving over to see what was going on—and to get in on the excitement—had gone home. And the Collins family was ready to settle down for a long summer’s nap.
In my room, before tumbling into bed, I looked down at the moonlit crazy-quilt bedspread and said, “What a waste of work! Even though you never know who might come home with you or stop in to see you, if nobody got to see the very neat way a boy could make his bed, it was a very sad shame!”
My prayer was maybe even shorter than the one I usually prayed at night, and only a few of the words of it stayed with me after I sailed off with Wynken, Blynken, and Nod into a sea of dew.
Early the next morning when I went out to our south pasture to drive in Lady MacBeth for Dad to milk her, I couldn’t find our contented Holstein anywhere!
Two or three times I let out a long, high-pitched cow call. What, I asked myself, had happened to her? Had all last night’s excitement been too much for her nervous cow temperament and she had run away?
“But she couldn’t get out!” I mumbled to myself, remembering the strong, new pasture bars I had just crawled through—the ones Dad had put there last night after the old ones had been smashed into giant-sized matchsticks when the pickup crashed through them.
“Sw-o-o-o-o-o-ok! Sw-o-o-o-oook!”
Still there wasn’t any black-and-white cow in sight—not until I looked under the elderberry bushes along the fencerow. And what to my still half-sleepy eyes should appear but Lady MacBeth, lying on her side and chewing her cud. Lying beside her, also chewing her cud, was a white-faced Hereford that was the same size as and looked exactly like Wandering Winnie!
“What on earth!” I said out loud. “Where in the world did you come from?”
But when I took a closer look, there wasn’t any barbed-wire-made scar above the long-eyelashed left eye.
Well, before noon that day, Little Jim had a brand-new Hereford calf to take the place of Wandering Winnie, who would never come home again. The neighbors, as soon as they found out what was in the gunnysack in the swamp, had chipped in and bought a substitute calf for him.
The gang didn’t get to do what we’d planned to do the day before—which was draw straws to see who got to climb out on the overhanging branch above the quicksand. We did get to watch one of the sheriff’s men do it, and we did get to satisfy ourselves that Wandering Winnie had really been rustled and butchered. The white calf’s head in the old burlap bag had a scar over its left eye.
After the sheriff and his men had driven away to town, the gang had a get-together in the shade of the beech tree near the Black Widow Stump.
Lying on our sides like contented cows chewing on grass stems, we listened to each other explain all the exciting things that had happened the exciting day and night before.
We were so busy and noisy talking that we hardly noticed the humming and buzzing of ten thousand bees gathering honey from the creamy yellow flowers of the leaning linden tree or the cheerful robins ordering us to cheerily, cheerily go jump in the lake.
Little Jim, grinning proudly, said to all of us, “It’s a good thing I put that ad in the paper.”
Dragonfly’s answer was a little sarcastic, but it was the truth, anyway, as he answered, “It’s also a good thing you didn’t know how to write ten dollars but offered a hundred-dollar reward instead. The rustlers would never have stolen another heifer to try to make you think it was your own dumb dogie.”
“I did know the difference,” Little Jim defended himself. “It was just a mistake”—which it seemed I ought to believe it was.
After our meeting broke up, and Little Jim and I were alone, he said to me, “I won’t feel so bad selling Winnie the Second this fall and adopting an orphan with the money, now that I know for sure my own Winnie is dead and I’ll never see her again, anyway.”
With that, Little Jim picked up a flat stone he found lying on the ground and gave it a long hard toss in the direction of Sugar Creek, like George Washington trying to throw a silver dollar across the Potomac River.
I watched that flat stone sail high out over the leaning linden tree until it reac
hed the top of its curve and dropped down with a splash into Sugar Creek’s foam-freckled face, starting a circle of waves that spread out and out in every direction there was.
It certainly felt good to be a boy and to be alive on such a wonderful sunshiny day.
The day seemed even more wonderful right after supper when I went out to feed Old Red Addie and her fine family of six red-haired pigs.
I tossed maybe seventeen ears of corn over the fence for their supper, and as I watched them come running and squealing to eat them, I focused my eyes on the reddest-haired one of all, the one Dad had given me when the litter had been born.
“You,” I said to that very fat little porker as he started eating like a pig one of the biggest ears of corn there was, “are going to market next fall so a little orphan boy in Korea can have roast beef once in a while.”
Feeling something brushing against my bare ankle, I looked down. It was old Mixy, stroking her soft black-and-white fur against me the way cats like to do.
All of a sudden I got one of the gladdest feelings ever a boy can get. I quickly stooped, scooped Mixy up in my arms, and, pressing my cheek against her soft fur, said, “You’re the nicest cat in the world—absolutely the nicest!”
But my scooping her up so fast scared the daylights out of her. She came to the fastest cat life I’d ever seen her come to in any of her nine lives. First, she shot out of my arms like a four-legged black-and-white arrow, straight for the hole that goes under the south side of our barn. And there she shot herself in—the way she always does when a neighborhood dog is chasing her.
The Sugar Creek Gang Series:
The Swamp Robber
The Killer Bear
The Winter Rescue
The Lost Campers
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 31-36 Page 41