Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 7-12

by Paul Hutchens

  But that’s getting into my next story before it happened, so I’ll have to stop right now and wait till later when I get more time, which I hope will be almost right away because of what happened being so important.

  The Sugar Creek Gang Series:

  1 The Swamp Robber

  2 The Killer Bear

  3 The Winter Rescue

  4 The Lost Campers

  5 The Chicago Adventure

  6 The Secret Hideout

  7 The Mystery Cave

  8 Palm Tree Manhunt

  9 One Stormy Day

  10 The Mystery Thief

  11 Teacher Trouble

  12 Screams in the Night

  13 The Indian Cemetery

  14 The Treasure Hunt

  15 Thousand Dollar Fish

  16 The Haunted House

  17 Lost in the Blizzard

  18 On the Mexican Border

  19 The Green Tent Mystery

  20 The Bull Fighter

  21 The Timber Wolf

  22 Western Adventure

  23 The Killer Cat

  24 The Colorado Kidnapping

  25 The Ghost Dog

  26 The White Boat Rescue

  27 The Brown Box Mystery

  28 The Watermelon Mystery

  29 The Trapline Thief

  30 The Blue Cow

  31 Treehouse Mystery

  32 The Cemetery Vandals

  33 The Battle of the Bees

  34 Locked in the Attic

  35 Runaway Rescue

  36 The Case of Missing Calf

  Paul Hutchens

  MOODY PUBLISHERS

  CHICAGO

  © 1946, 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 1995 by The Lockman Foundation, La Habra, Calif. Used by permission. (www.Lockman.org)

  ISBN: 978-0-8024-7013-3

  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

  The trouble the Sugar Creek Gang had with our new teacher started the very first day we started to school again after Christmas vacation. As you maybe know, we all had flown down to Palm Tree Island and came back to find that, while we were gone, our pretty lady teacher had gotten married and had resigned from being teacher. We were going to have a man teacher instead to finish out the year. Imagine that! A man teacher for the Sugar Creek School, when all we’d ever had had been lady teachers whom we’d all liked. We were all plenty mad. Plenty!

  We might not have had all the trouble, though, if it hadn’t been for Shorty Long, the new tough guy who had moved into the neighborhood and who was just starting at our school.

  As I said, the trouble started the very first day. Just before eight o’clock that morning, I was flying around in our house like a chicken with its head off, looking for my cap and mittens and asking Mom if my lunch box was ready. Mom was trying to keep Charlotte Ann, my baby sister, quiet so she and I could hear each other; Dad was in the living room trying to listen to the morning news on the radio; and Poetry, the barrel-shaped member of our gang, was out by the big walnut tree near our front gate, whistling and yelling for me to hurry up or we’d be late; and I couldn’t find my arithmetic book—which are all the reasons that I wasn’t in a very good humor to start off to school.

  So it was the easiest thing in the world for me to get mad quick, when, about ten or maybe fifteen minutes later, we met Shorty Long, the new tough guy who’d moved into our neighborhood, down at the end of the lane.

  Anyway, pretty soon I was out of our house, slamming the door after me and dashing out through the snow path I’d shoveled that morning myself, toward Poetry, who was at the gate, waiting.

  I wasn’t any farther than twenty noisy steps away from the house when I heard the kitchen door open behind me, and my dad’s big voice thundered out after me and said, “Jasper!” which is my middle name and which I don’t like. My whole name is William Jasper Collins, but I’d rather be called just plain “Bill,” because that is what the gang calls me. And besides, Dad never called me Jasper except when I had done something wrong or he thought I had. So when he thundered after me, “Jasper!” I stopped dead in my tracks and looked back.

  Dad’s big bushy, reddish-blackish eyebrows were down, and his jaw was hard-looking, and I knew right away I’d done something wrong.

  “What?” I called back to him, starting toward the gate again. “I’ve got to hurry, or I’ll be late.”

  “Come back and shut the door decently!” Dad said, and when he says things like that to me like that, I nearly always obey him quick or wish I had.

  I was halfway back to the door when Poetry squawked from the gate, saying, “Hurry up, Bill!” which I did.

  I dashed back to our kitchen door and had started to shut it decently, when Dad stopped me and said, “Remember now, Son, you boys behave yourselves today. Mr. Black is a fine man, and you’ll like him all right just as soon as you get used to him!”

  “We won’t,” I said. I’d already made up my mind I wasn’t going to like him because he was a man teacher, because we’d never had a man at Sugar Creek School, and also because we had all liked our pretty lady teacher so well that we didn’t want anybody else!

  “What do you mean, you won’t?” Dad said, still holding the door open so that I couldn’t shut it decently. “You mean you won’t behave yourselves?”

  “I’ll be late!” I said. “I’ve got to go—Poetry’s waiting for me!”

  My dad raised his voice all of a sudden and yelled to Poetry, “Hold your horses, Leslie Thompson”—which is Poetry’s real name. “The first bell hasn’t rung yet!”

  And it hadn’t. When it did ring, there would still be a half hour for us to get to school, which didn’t start until half past eight.

  But we all liked to get there early on a Monday morning, though, so that we could see each other, none of us having seen all of us for two or three days. We might meet some of the gang on the way—Circus, our acrobat; Big Jim, our leader; Little Jim, the best Christian in the gang; pop-eyed Dragonfly; and maybe Little Tom Till, the new member. Tom’s big brother, Bob, had caused us a lot of trouble last year, but he’d quit school and had gone away to a city and was working in a f
actory.

  You know, about every year we had some new boy move into our neighborhood, and nearly always we had trouble with him until he found out whether he was going to get to run the gang or was just going to try to, and always it turned out that he only tried to. Also, we always had to decide whether the new guy was going to be a member of the gang—and sometimes he couldn’t be.

  “Jasper Collins!” my dad said to me, still holding our back door open so that I couldn’t shut it decently—and also holding onto my collar with his other hand—“you’re not going another inch until you promise me you’ll treat Mr. Black decently. Promise me that!”

  Just that second my mom’s voice called from some part of our house and said, “For land’s sake, shut the door! We can’t heat up the whole farm!”

  “I can’t!” I yelled back to her. “Dad won’t let me!”

  Well, that certainly didn’t make my dad feel very good, and I shouldn’t have said it, because it was being sarcastic. Anyway, Dad tightened his grip on my collar and kind of jerked me back and said to me under his breath so that Poetry wouldn’t hear, “We’ll settle this tonight when you get home.”

  “Can I go now, then?” I said.

  And he said, “Yes”—still under his breath—“I can’t very well correct you while Poetry is here.” And that is one reason I liked my parents—they never gave me a hard calling down when we had company but always waited till later.

  The very second my dad let me loose, I shot away from our back door like a rock shooting out of a boy’s sling, straight for Poetry and the front gate. I got to where Poetry was holding the gate open for me just as I heard my dad shut our back door decently.

  Poetry and I were already talking and listening to each other and being terribly glad to be together again, when our kitchen door opened again and Dad’s big voice thundered after me, “Bill!”

  “What?” I yelled, and he yelled back to me, “Shut that gate!” which I ran back and did without saying anything.

  A jiffy later Poetry and I were swishing through the snow toward Sugar Creek School—not knowing it was the beginning of a very exciting day and also the beginning of a lot of new trouble for the Sugar Creek Gang.

  We were ker-squashing along through the snow, making our own path with our feet—there hadn’t been any cars or sleighs on our road yet that morning because ours wasn’t an arterial road—when Poetry said all of a sudden, “My pop says we’ve got to like the new teacher.”

  “My dad told me the same thing,” I said and sighed, knowing it was going to be hard to like somebody I already didn’t like.

  Well, we soon came to the north road, where we saw, coming across the Sugar Creek bridge, two boys and a lot of girls. Right away I knew the girls were Circus’s sisters. One of them was named Lucille and was maybe the nicest girl in all of Sugar Creek School and was just my age, and she wasn’t afraid of spiders and mice and things, and sometimes she smiled at me across the schoolroom. And walking right beside Lucille on the other side of Circus was another guy, and it was Shorty Long, the new boy who’d moved into our neighborhood and whom I didn’t like!

  “Look!” Poetry said to me. “Shorty Long is carrying two lunch boxes!”

  “He’s big enough to need two,” I said and didn’t like him even worse.

  “Looks like it’s Lucille’s lunch box,” Poetry said, and the very minute he said it I knew what he meant …

  Almost right away I wondered if there was maybe going to be another fight between Shorty Long and me—I’d had a fierce one just before the Sugar Creek Gang had flown down to Palm Tree Island.

  Well, Shorty Long raised his voice and yelled to us something in that crazy new language he’d started us all to talking, which Dragonfly liked so well, and which is called “Openglopish”—which you talk by just putting an “op” in front of all the vowel sounds in your words.

  So this is what Shorty Long yelled to us: “Hopi, Bopill! Hopi, Popo-opetropy!”—which is Openglopish for “Hi, Bill! Hi, Poetry!”

  I really think I would have liked the language if Shorty Long hadn’t been the one to start it in the Sugar Creek neighborhood.

  Before I knew what I was going to say, I said, looking at Lucille’s red lunch box in Shorty Long’s left hand, “Keep still. Talk English! Don’t call me ‘Bopill’! Take that other syllable off!”

  Even as far away as I was, I thought I saw his red face turn redder, and then he yelled to me and said, “All right, if you don’t want to be a good sport, I’ll take it off. From now on you’re just plain ‘Pill.’ Pill as in caterpillar.”

  And that started the fuse on my fiery temper to burning very fast. I saw red, and Lucille’s red lunch box didn’t help any. Besides, I was already mad from having all that trouble with my dad. Besides that, also I’d always carried Lucille’s lunch box myself when Big Jim was along and he carried our new minister’s daughter’s lunch box at the same time.

  In fact, it was Big Jim’s being especially polite to Sylvia, our minister’s daughter, that got me started being kind to a girl myself—girls belonging to the human race, also.

  “I’ll carry your box for you,” I said to Circus’s sister and started to reach for it.

  But Shorty Long interrupted my hand and said loftily, “Don’t disturb the lady!” Then he swung around quick and shoved me terribly hard with his shoulder and walked on beside Lucille.

  At the same minute, my boots got tangled up in each other, and I found myself going down a deep ditch backward and sideways and headfirst all at the same time into a big snowdrift—which was the beginning of the fight.

  Just as I was trying to untangle myself from myself and struggle to my feet, I heard a couple of yells coming from different directions. I looked up to see Little Jim and Dragonfly running across from the woods. And at the same time, I also heard a girl’s fierce voice saying, “You can’t carry my lunch box! I’ll carry it myself!”

  I looked up from my snowdrift just in time to see Shorty Long whirl around with the red lunch box in his hand and hold it out so that Circus’s sister couldn’t reach it. I also looked just in time to see a pair of flying feet, which looked like Dragonfly’s, make a dive for Shorty Long, and then there were three of us in that big snowdrift at the same time. Also at the same time, I heard a lunch box go squash with the sound of a glass and maybe a spoon or a fork or something inside, and that was that.

  Well, all I had to do was to turn over on my stomach, and I was on top of Shorty Long. And being mad, I felt as strong as the village blacksmith whose “muscles on his brawny arms were strong as iron bands.” So I yelled and grunted to Shorty Long between short pants of breath, “You will forget to wash your face in the morning, will you! Doesn’t your mother teach you to wash your face before you go to school? Shame on you!” All of a sudden I remembered I’d forgotten to wash mine.

  Right away I was scooping up handfuls of snow and washing Shorty’s Long’s face and neck and saying to him, “I’ll teach you to throw an innocent girl’s lunch box around like that.”

  Boy, oh, boy, I tell you, I felt fine on top of Shorty Long, imagining how everybody up on the road was watching and feeling proud of me. Even Circus’s sister would be proud of me, a little guy licking the stuffings out of a great big lummox like Shorty Long! Why, I was hardly half as big as he was, and I was licking him in a fight right in front of everybody! It felt good!

  Just that minute the school bell rang, and I knew we all ought to get going if we wanted to get to school ahead of time and sort of look at the teacher, and maybe I ought to clean out my desk a little too, not having done it the day before our Christmas vacation had begun.

  So I jerked myself loose from Shorty Long, scrambled to my feet, shook my cap, knocked off some of the snow, and climbed back up into the road again, where I thought everybody had been standing watching the fight. I guess maybe I really expected them to say something about the wonderful fight I’d won, but would you believe it? The girls and Poetry had walked on up the road.
I looked for the red lunch box and also for mine. But the red one wasn’t anywhere around. Then I saw it, swinging back and forth in Circus’s sister’s hand, about fifty feet up the road.

  “I’ll carry it for you,” I said when I caught up with the rest of the crowd.

  And would you believe this? It was the most disgusting thing that ever happened, and it made me mad all over the inside of me. That girl I’d made a fool out of myself to be a hero for didn’t even appreciate all I’d done, not even the fact that I’d given some of my life’s blood for her (which I had, for my nose was bleeding a little, and for the first time I noticed my jaw hurt too, where Shorty Long must have hit me).

  She looked at me as if I was so much chaff blowing out of a threshing machine and said, “Can’t you live one day without getting into a fight? I think Shorty Long is nice.”

  Well, that spoiled my day. In fact, it looked as if it had spoiled my whole life maybe.

  “All right, Smarty,” I said, “you can work your own arithmetic problems this year.”

  And I walked behind them and on the other side of the road all the rest of the way to our red brick schoolhouse, which with its two front windows and its one door between them, and the little roofless porch, looked sort of like a red-faced boy’s face, with a scowl on it.

  “’S’matter?” I heard somebody say beside me, and it was Little Jim, swishing along, carrying his stick in one hand and his own lunch box in the other.

  “Nothing,” I said, but I felt better right away. Little Jim could do that to a guy—make him feel better just by asking, “’S’matter?” which he always did when I was bothered about something.

  “Dad says we have to like Mr. Black, the new teacher,” Little Jim said and struck hard at a chokecherry shrub that was growing close to the road, knocking snow off of it. Some of the cold snow hit me in the hot face and felt good.