I did manage to say, though, “John Till—Mr. Till, Little Tom is one of my best friends. I like him very m-much.”
Then the gruff-voiced policeman said, “All right, John Till! We’ll can the sob stuff. Into the backseat there!”
John turned. There wasn’t anything we could do, not a thing. We just had to stand there and watch him get in, listen to the door slam, hear the motor speed up as the driver stepped on the accelerator, and watch the big black car back out of the drive. Then we watched as it went forward and down the hill, across the little tributary bridge, and on up the hill on the other side of the valley. Pretty soon its two taillights looked like two tiny red stars at the top of the hill.
John Till was on his way to jail.
I didn’t know till later that the reason John Till hadn’t gone down all the way into the quicksand was that, when he got in up to his neck, his foot had struck a rock down there, and he’d been balancing himself on it. If his foot had slipped off while we were taking such a long time rescuing him, he’d have gone down for sure.
10
Yes, John Till was on his way to jail. And in a few minutes the Sugar Creek Gang—all there were with us at the time—were on our way home in Little Jim’s dad’s car. Not only that, but this Sugar Creek Gang story is on its way to the end. It won’t be long now until I shall come to the very last word.
All the time I rode along in Little Jim’s dad’s sort of oldish car, I kept thinking about what my dad was going to say to Seneth Paddler when he called to see him the next day in his rustic old cabin in the hills.
I could see in my mind’s eye that little log cabin with its clapboard roof and its back door down in the cellar. I could see the old flintlock on the wall. I could see the little cow’s horn with a cap on the large end, which had been used for gunpowder a long time ago. I could see the clean-looking bed. I could see the stairway. I kept thinking about it all as we all rode along.
Little Jim was riding along with us. His dad had said he could if he wanted to. Dragonfly and Poetry sat in the backseat because they lived in the same direction as I did. We went across the noisy bridge that spanned the tributary and then followed the same trail that the police car had taken when its two red taillights had looked like two crimson stars at the top of the hill. On up, farther and farther up that little lane-like road we drove until we came to the cornfields across from our house.
We turned left at a tall, branching elm tree, which in the summertime had enough shade for many boys to play under. But we hardly ever played there. It wasn’t a very friendly tree. Its branches were so very high, and its trunk was too large around for any of us boys to climb. Not even Circus had ever climbed it and didn’t even want to. Every other tree along Sugar Creek seemed to belong to us and maybe had grown just for us, but this one didn’t seem to belong.
We turned there, drove along the end of Dad’s last year’s cornfield, turned left in a little while, and went down the road to the Collins house. As I sat there in the front seat with Little Jim between me and his dad, looking down the graveled driveway to our house, I could see a light in the kitchen window. I knew that my mom and my dad would be awake waiting for me. I could hardly wait to tell them everything that had happened.
There is something good about coming home, something great.
Pretty soon, Mr. Foote’s car was stopping beside our front gate, not far from the mailbox that had printed on it the words THEODORE COLLINS, which is my dad’s name. The car lights shone on those letters, and I felt proud of my great big dad.
I climbed out of the car and said, “Good night, Mr. Foote. Thank you very, very much.” Little Jim was so sleepy he was all slumped over beside his dad. Poetry and Dragonfly in the backseat were still awake, although I could tell by looking close into Dragonfly’s dragonfly-like eyes that he was getting very drowsy.
For a minute I forgot all about having to have my teeth filled in the morning. I said, “So long, everybody.” Then I turned and lifted the little latch that let me through our front gate. Dad had shut it as he always does at night.
I walked across the only footpath my folks will let me have across our yard, on account of Mom’s wanting a nice grassy lawn, and came to the boardwalk that leads from our back porch steps to the pitcher pump maybe twenty feet away.
I lifted the pump handle, listened to it squeak as I shoved it down, and watched a nice stream of water come spouting out, sparkling in the moonlight. I watched the pretty little ripples it made in the tub out of which our horses drink sometimes. Sometimes old Mixy drinks from that tub.
I started toward the back porch steps. Then I stopped again and looked back toward the moon, which was sailing in a very pretty sky, and I thought about all the things I had been thinking about. Somehow or other as I looked at that big, beautiful, half-round moon with what looked like continents of different shapes on it, I thought about its being the same moon that would be shining on Old Man Paddler’s cabin, the same moon that would be shining on the jail where John Till was right that minute taking a shower.
And then, looking at those dark places on the moon that looked like continents on a globe, I got to thinking that it was the same moon that would be shining down upon that little caterpillar-shaped island away down in the northern part of the Caribbean Sea. I got to thinking how nice it would be if I could go flying in an airplane above the clouds and under a moon like that with the ocean down below and with the whole Sugar Creek Gang sitting in the seats all around me. It felt good to imagine having a ride like that.
Pretty soon I heard the latch of our back door squeak. Then I heard the door open with the same noise it always makes. And then the screen door opened, and there was the same friendly squeaking in its springs. My dad’s big voice, which nearly always sounds like a bullfrog’s voice does along Sugar Creek, called to me and said, “Well, Bill Collins! Come on into the house.” He said it so cheerfully.
I looked up, and there he was with his striped pajamas on. I was glad to see him.
Just as I came through the door and shut it, my mom called from the bedroom away on the other side of the living room. “Well,” she said, “my boy is home again. Did you have a nice time? No!” She raised her voice a little to say that and then added, “Don’t tell us now. I’m too sleepy. Wait till morning to tell us.”
The way she said that made me want to start in and tell her everything that happened on our hunting trip. So I did start but was almost immediately interrupted by my dad. “Bill Collins, it’s after midnight! You’ll have to hurry or you won’t get any sleep before the dentist starts grinding on your teeth at ten o’clock tomorrow morning!”
Wham! That was the way it felt to have him remind me of tomorrow morning.
“What?” I said. “What time did you say?”
My dad’s deep voice laughed, and he said, “After you left, I called Dr. Mellen and told him that eight o’clock would be a bit early for you on Saturday if you were up late Friday night. So he looked over his appointments and telephoned back a little later. He said he’d had a cancellation. He said John Till was to come in at ten, but he didn’t think he would be there, so—”
That started me to talking again, because I felt good to think I didn’t have to get up so early, and even Mom felt better about it. Before I was through, I had talked and talked and talked. I had to wait till morning for some of it, though, because they didn’t want me to wake up Charlotte Ann by mimicking the hounds and Jeep, which I had been doing every now and then in my story.
The morning was a wonderful morning. I finished telling all the things I hadn’t thought of the night before. By the time I was through, I had told my parents everything that you have already read.
Then Dad took me to the dentist’s office.
“How long will it take?” he asked Dr. Mellen, who right that minute had me in the big chair with my mouth open and a small mirror with a handle on it moving around beside my teeth just before he started grinding.
Dr. Mellen looke
d at his watch and said. “Not long. Maybe thirty minutes.”
“I’ll wait,” Dad said. And then he said to me. “You can go with me to see Old Man Paddler if you want to.”
Well, I wanted to. If the Sugar Creek Gang does get to go to a foreign country because Old Man Paddler sends us there, I thought, it’ll be the first time in my life I’ve ever been out of the United States. It’ll also be the first time I’ve been in an airplane above the ocean.
Yes, I surely wanted to.
Moody Press, a ministry of the Moody Bible Institute,
is designed for education, evangelization, and edification.
If we may assist you in knowing more about Christ
and the Christian life, please write us without obligation:
Moody Press, c/o MLM, Chicago, Illinois 60610.
Paul Hutchens
MOODY PUBLISHERS
CHICAGO
© 1969, 1997 by
PAULINE HUTCHENS WILSON
Revised Edition, 1997
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.
Original Title: Sugar Creek Gang on Palm Tree Island
ISBN-10: 0-8024-7012-2
ISBN-13: 978-0-8024-7012-6
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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
It was the snowiest day I had ever seen when Poetry came over to my house pulling his sled after him. He was wading along in his boots down our road. Snowflakes as big as pullets’ eggs were falling all around him. As soon as I saw him, I knew that he had something important to tell me. I stepped out onto our back porch with my head bare, and Mom called and told me to come in and get my cap on or I’d catch my death of cold.
Poetry waved his arm and yelled, “Hey! Bill!”
“What?” I yelled back out across the snow to him.
“Wait just a minute!” He came puffing up to our front gate, lifted the latch, and shoved the gate open, pushing hard against the snow that had drifted there. Then he came on through, pulling his sled after him.
While he was wading up to our back porch, I went into the house to get my fur-lined cap. I pulled on my boots and all the different clothes Mom said I had to wear or I’d catch my death of cold. Then I opened the door and went out into the snowflakes, which were still as big as pullets’ eggs and were coming down like goose feathers. It was as if a big airplane full of feathers had burst up there in the sky somewhere.
The first thing I did was to scoop up a handful of nice fresh, clean, soft snow and make it into a ball the size of a baseball and throw it whizzety-sizzle out across the barnyard at our old black-and-white cat. She’d been sitting and mewing like everything on the side of the barn where there wasn’t so much snow, acting as if she was disgusted with the weather, even though it wasn’t very cold.
I didn’t have the least idea what the snowball was going to do. In fact, I’d have been shocked if I had known it was going to fly so high—or that, the very minute it got to the corner of the barn, the boy who had just moved into our neighborhood was going to come dashing around in time to get socked kersquash on the top of his brand-new bright red cap.
Certainly I didn’t know that brand-new boy had a temper as fiery as mine or that he was a fierce fighter and was bigger than I was, and older, and was a bully—because I’d never seen him.
But the minute I saw what was going to happen, I felt a funny tingling sensation go zippering up my spine to the roots of my red hair, and I knew there was going to be trouble.
Dad had told me there was a new family moving into the house down beyond the mouth of the branch and that they had a boy who might want to join the Sugar Creek Gang. I hadn’t liked the idea very well. Any new boy in our neighborhood nearly always meant that somebody in our gang wouldn’t like him, and there was bound to be some kind of an interesting fight before we found out whether he was going to run the gang or was just going to try to.
But there he was—running head-on into my innocent snowball! Well, when you don’t do a thing on purpose, you don’t feel very guilty for having done it.
I don’t think I ever saw a snowball fly faster than that one did—and I don’t think I ever missed my mark so far in my life. Anyway, the thing happened. The next thing I knew, that snowball, which I’d made as hard almost as a baseball, crashed wham-thud right on the top of that new boy’s head, and the snowball and the red cap landed in a snowdrift, which the wind had piled high at the corner of the barn.
And that’s how the Sugar Creek Gang came to find out right away whether the new guy was going to be friendly or not—and he wasn’t.
There he was, standing, looking astonished and funny and mad and surprised and everything else. He let out a yell and six or seven swear words, which made me angry right away because Dad had taught me not to swear. That new guy’s swearing made me so mad I was ready to fight even before I knew I was going to have to.
And I had to. I mean I really did or else get the stuffings knocked out of me.
He swung around quick and made a dive for his cap in the snowdrift. He shook it out like a dog shaking a rat, while our old black-and-white cat made a dive for the barn door at the same time. Then that guy made a snowball quicker than you can say “Jack Robinson Crusoe and his man Friday.” He swung back his right arm and threw that snowball straight at my head. Before I could duck, I’d been hit ker-squash-wham-thud myself and was seeing stars. I was also feeling the cold air on my head as my cap flew off. I made a dive for it, shook it out, and had it back on in half a jiffy.
Well, that cold snowball was too hot for me, so I yelled back, “You big lummox! I didn’t aim to hit you. I was throwing that snowball at our old cat!”
But he didn’t get it straight! He yelled back at me, “I’m not a big lummox, and I’m not an old cat!”
And without intending to—being a little mixed up in my mind because of being half angry—I yelled back at him, “You are too!” And the fight was on.
He started on the run toward me, scooping up snow and throwing snowballs at me on the way. And I was doing the same thing to him. He was calling me a redhead, and I was calling him a big lummox. And pretty soon he threw a snowball that hit me before it left his hand, which means
he hit me with his fist! And then I was seeing red stars and fighting like everything and rolling in the snow, and so was he. I didn’t even remember Poetry was there until I heard him saying, “Atta boy, Bill! Let him have it!”
Then I woke up to the fact that I was having a fight and that Dad had told me I was not to have any more fights—anyway, not to start any. I could fight only if the other guy started it.
Even while I was washing that new boy’s ears with snow and smearing his face with more snow, I couldn’t remember which one of us had started the fight. Then I thought I heard Dad call from the house or from somewhere, and that’s how I happened to lose the fight. The next thing I knew I was plunging headfirst into a drift. Then I was down under that guy and couldn’t breathe and was trying to yell and was choking and smothering, and I couldn’t turn over or anything. For a minute it seemed like a million years before I could get my breath again. I’d been hit right in the stomach just before I went down, and there just wasn’t any wind left in me, and I couldn’t breathe anyway. So I gave up without even knowing I was giving up, and the fight was over for a while.
Just then Mom came out and stood on our back porch and called, “Boys, I’ve just finished baking a blackberry pie. Would you like some?”
Well, Poetry heard that before any of the rest of us did. He yelled back, “Sure!”
2
It was really too bad that our perfectly innocent fight had to break up right at that minute. I knew very well that if I could have started over again, I could have licked the stuffings out of that great big guy. But when a fight ends in an invitation to eat blackberry pie, a fellow doesn’t feel so bad about it.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 7-12 Page 8