Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 7-12

by Paul Hutchens

  Then Big Jim said, “Bill, I think you’d better let Mr. Black have your personal property.”

  Well, my right hand still held onto that note Dragonfly had written. All of a sudden I realized that it was not only Bill Collins who was in trouble, but it was Dragonfly, the greatest little guy in the gang, except maybe Little Jim.

  While I was trying to make up my mind whether or not to do what Big Jim said, Mr. Black glared down at me with his jaw set and said very firmly, “It’s the last time I’m asking you, William Collins! Give it to me now or take the consequences!”

  Well, I didn’t know what the consequences might be, so I pulled my hand out of my pocket and tossed the folded-up note onto the teacher’s desk.

  And that must have proved to him I was a roughneck, for he turned quick as a flash and said, “Stand up, William Collins! Get the note and hand it to me,” which, for some reason, I did almost right away.

  He stood there, the folded note in his hand, behind his big desk and looked out over the schoolroom through his thick-lensed glasses. He said, “Students of Sugar Creek School, the leader of the Sugar Creek Gang is right. This note was the personal property of William Collins. However, since it was passed contrary to the rules of this school, it now belongs to me. Also since Roy Gilbert wrote the note, I’ll ask you to stand up, Roy!” He looked straight over to where Dragonfly was sitting.

  I hadn’t heard Dragonfly’s real name for so long that I hardly knew who Mr. Black meant until I saw Dragonfly jump, shuffle to his feet, and stand looking down at his hands. He was actually shaking, because he knew what I also knew—that the note was making fun of Mr. Black’s bald head.

  “You may come to the platform, Roy,” Mr. Black said, and his face was very set.

  “Y-yes, sir,” Dragonfly said and started to shuffle down the aisle past the first-grade girls near the front and to the desk.

  “You wrote this note, Roy?” Mr. Black asked.

  Dragonfly’s voice was trembling so badly it was pitiful. “Y-yes, s-sir!” he stuttered, and his voice certainly didn’t sound like a roughneck’s voice, not nearly as much as Mr. Black’s did when he said, “All right, you may read it to the school!”

  3

  I felt sorry for little Dragonfly as he stood there beside Mr. Black’s desk. Different girls in the room were half crying, and all of us were maybe feeling as we’d never felt before in all our lives. We’d never had much trouble in the Sugar Creek School, on account of, as you know, our teachers had all been lady teachers and we had liked them.

  All the time I was imagining what Dragonfly would see the very minute he unfolded that note. It would be, “Some men have their hair parted on the left side, some have it parted on the right, some have it parted in the middle, and still others have it departed.”

  I happened to look at Shorty Long then—and I had to look right across the top of Circus’s ordinary-looking sister’s head, which had a pretty blue hair ribbon in it. And do you know what? Shorty Long’s big face had a funny look. He was looking straight at me, and there was a half sneer on his face, which seemed to say, “Smarty, you guys are going to catch it now. I wish it was you up there, Bill Collins.”

  Maybe I just imagined that half sneer on his face was saying that, on account of my not liking him a lot. Then I looked at Dragonfly, and he was getting ready to do what Mr. Black had told him to do, and that was to read the note out loud to the whole school!

  He unfolded the paper as if it had a snake in it—or maybe the way a girl would have opened it if she was afraid there might be a live mouse wrapped inside.

  Then Dragonfly held the paper out toward the window as if he couldn’t see very well, blinked his eyes, and started to move over toward the window. At the window he strained his eyes again and rubbed first one of them and then the other. Well, it would have been funny if it had been, but it wasn’t, although maybe a little bit.

  All of a sudden Dragonfly looked up and out the window. Then all of us did, because right that second we heard sleigh bells coming down the road.

  Say, if there’s anything in all the world that sounds prettier than anything else it’s the sound of sleigh bells across the snow! Even while we were having all that trouble, I felt sorry for the people down in Palm Tree Island, where we’d all been just a week before, because they never have any snow or any sleigh bells.

  Mr. Black’s voice broke into my thoughts like a big finger being poked into a pretty soap bubble. He said, “All right, Gilbert”—meaning Dragonfly—“you may quit stalling! Read the note!”

  Dragonfly strained his eyes again, swallowed the way a scrawny-necked rooster does when it is trying to swallow something too large for its thin neck. Then he looked at me like a sick chicken, as much as to say, “Well, here goes … sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish.”

  He also reminded me of a boy in swimming, getting ready to duck himself, who takes hold of his nose with one hand, gets ready, shuts his eyes, and plunks himself under.

  All the time the sleigh bells were getting closer and closer. They seemed to be coming very fast straight for the schoolhouse. In fact, I looked past Dragonfly’s head and saw two frisky, high-stepping horses hitched to a big bobsled swing through the open gate into the lane that runs along the edge of our schoolyard and come dashing, with bells ringing wildly, right toward the woodshed and the big maple tree.

  Dragonfly swallowed again and strained his eyes at the note, just as a man’s big voice outside called to the horses and said, “Whoa!” which is what you say to horses you are driving when you want them to stop.

  Well, we couldn’t have heard Dragonfly anyway. Besides, not a one of us wanted to. As I looked out the window, the horses pawed and pranced in a very proud way. Their bells were jingling and jangling, and the man was calling, “Whoa, Blixen! Whoa, there, Donner!” Blixen and Donner, of course, were the names of two of the reindeer in the poem called “The Night Before Christmas.”

  I looked at Poetry, who always liked that poem so well, and his lips were already moving.

  I knew that if we’d been somewhere else and he had had half a chance, he’d have been saying,

  “’Twas the night before Christmas

  When all through the house,

  Not a creature was stirring,

  Not even a mouse.”

  That’s a great poem. I had even memorized it my lazy self. Anyway, those sleigh bells saved Dragonfly’s life—or his skin maybe—because Mr. Black said, “Quick, everybody in your seats. We’re having company. Act natural. Start studying!”

  Well, it was natural for some of us to start studying, and for some of us it would have been more natural to stop studying. But right that second I heard a woman’s musical voice, and something inside me just started ringing like sleigh bells. It made me feel so good I could have shouted out loud, but I didn’t dare.

  I knew, though, that if I’d been outside I would’ve, because the musical voice I’d heard was the pretty voice of our pretty other teacher, whom we’d all liked and who had gotten married while we were on our vacation in Palm Tree Island—and shouldn’t have. At least she shouldn’t have without maybe asking the Sugar Creek Gang what we thought about it.

  Suddenly Mr. Black cleared his throat loud enough to be heard above the noise of the jingling sleigh bells and the noise in the schoolroom, such as the shuffling of feet and the closing of books and the sniffling of Dragonfly, who had a cold—Dragonfly nearly always had a cold in the winter and hay fever in the summer and nearly always had one of his dad’s big red bandanna handkerchiefs in—and also out of—his pocket.

  Just looking at Dragonfly’s red bandanna reminded me of what had happened down on Palm Tree Island. For a second I could see Dragonfly down there, sneezing and sneezing and sneezing, and I could see—and smell—the big brown billy goat that belonged to Old Man Paddler’s lost twin brother.

  But my thoughts came back in a flash to our one-room school when I heard our teacher say, “Attention, everybody”—
meaning all of us please keep stiller than we were, as he might have something important to say.

  He said, “Students of Sugar Creek School, I want all of you to act as if nothing has happened. Now, we’ve planned a little surprise for you all today—a bobsled ride at the noon hour. Attention!” He raised his big voice and lowered his bushy black eyebrows at the same time. “Some of you boys don’t deserve this surprise—”

  He stopped and looked straight toward where I was sitting, and for some reason I was chewing gum—not even realizing I was doing it—although I knew it was against the rule to chew gum in school.

  Anyway, I’d read a lot of advertisements in newspapers and magazines that said chewing gum was good for your nerves. And I really felt nervous that morning, what with getting called down and all the excitement and everything else that was going on, and also all the trouble I’d had at home, and with my dad planning to deal with me that night when I got home from school, and everything. So hardly knowing I was going to do it, I had taken some gum from Circus, who had slipped it to me very quietly just a jiffy before. I had it in my mouth, chewing vigorously.

  Mr. Black, with his eyebrows down and his voice up, thundered at me, “William Collins! Take that gum out of your mouth!”

  Well, it wasn’t funny, but almost half the school snickered, even some of the girls. But nobody had time to laugh, on account of Mr. Black’s shushing everybody and saying, “Order!”

  Right away there was a little order.

  Then he said, “Lay aside your work!” which most of us did. The rest of us had already laid it aside.

  Then he said, “I want absolutely perfect behavior on this sleigh ride. Understand?” He glared at us, and we understood.

  Then he said, “Everybody wear your coats and caps and boots and don’t act like a pack of animals.”

  Boy, oh, boy, oh, boy! This was going to be more fun than you could shake a stick at—a bobsled ride with our pretty other teacher and also with her husband. They lived about a mile up the road from the schoolhouse, and he was a farmer whom all of us boys knew and liked, most farmers being very fine people. The only thing was, we had all been kind of mad at him for marrying our teacher. Maybe he was going to try to make up for all the trouble he had caused us by taking us for a ride.

  Anyway, we were really going to have fun.

  Well, I hadn’t any more than got my gum out of my mouth than I heard a sort of rustle beside me, and it was Circus’s hand passing something to me. It was a folded piece of paper that looked like the one Dragonfly had had a minute before and was my personal property. So just as quick as I could, I wrapped the gum in that note, smashing it in good and hard, so as to make the gum stick to it and also to make it hard for anybody to ever read what Dragonfly had written.

  Then school was dismissed, and there was a sound like a barnyard full of chickens and hogs and cattle and barking dogs as we made a dive for our coats and caps and boots at the back of the schoolroom. The girls went almost as noisily as the boys—my dad says most girls act like boys do anyway until they are a dozen years old. Then some of them start acting like girls, which is just as bad.

  But a bobsled ride! With a whole gang of laughing, yelling, talking, screaming boys and girls!

  4

  Going on a bobsled ride with the Sugar Creek Gang and all the rest of Sugar Creek School is almost the most fun a guy can have. In about seven minutes nearly all of us, with coats on, had finished eating our lunch, most of us still chewing the last three bites.

  And I never saw a man teacher act as polite as Mr. Black when we were having company. You would have thought all of us had been perfect all morning, the way he talked to Miss Brown, whose name wasn’t Miss Brown anymore but was Mrs. Jesperson. That’s a Scandinavian name and means she had married a Scandinavian, which Mr. Jesperson, her husband, was. We all knew him as Joe. He was a very polite person, and when he talked, it sounded as if he was singing a song that didn’t have any tune but only rhythm.

  Pretty soon the Sugar Creek School had itself scattered all over the big wagon box, which was filled with oats straw and blankets and lap robes and car rugs. We were all yelling and talking and laughing and saying such things as “Ouch!”; “Hey, move over!”; “Get off my foot!”; “That’s my stomach you’re walking on!” and things like that, when Mr. Black told us all to keep still a minute, which we did for half a minute.

  He said to our lady teacher, “I can understand, Miss Brown—I beg your pardon, Mrs. Jesperson—why you liked the pupils of the Sugar Creek School. They are a fine bunch, and I’m sure we’ll have a very happy half year together.”

  Well, it sounded very polite. I looked from where I was sitting beside and behind different members of the gang in the front of the wagon box to see if he really meant it. His voice was very polite as he finished.

  But for some reason, the words “half year” sounded like an awfully long time before school would be out for the summer and the gang would be free to go galloping up and down Sugar Creek, along the paths, barefoot, and having fun again.

  “I’m sure they are a fine bunch, as you say, Mr. Black,” Miss Brown—I mean, Mrs. Jesperson—said. She smiled, but before her smile had finished itself, her brown eyes were looking straight into her Swedish husband’s gray-blue ones, and he was getting the tail end of her smile instead of Mr. Black.

  “I’m sorry I won’t be able to go along,” Mr. Black said. “I have some work to outline for the seventh grade. Be sure to have everybody back by one thirty.”

  Poetry, beside me, said, “Hey! He’s giving us an extra half hour!” which he was, and which was the first thing I’d noticed about our new teacher that made me think maybe I was going to like him a little bit, even if he had scolded me and even if he wasn’t a good enough citizen of the United States to respect the personal property of others.

  Several times during that ride, I looked up from where I was sitting to our pretty lady other teacher and her husband. I noticed they were looking at each other as if they thought each other was the most important person in the world.

  Pretty soon we were off—with the horses prancing, with Mr. and Mrs. Jesperson sitting together at the front, with Mrs. Jesperson helping to drive a little, with the rest of us behind them, and with the sleigh bells jingling and jangling and all of us yelling and hollering and calling to each other and laughing and having a great time.

  It was while we were on that bobsled ride that Shorty Long said something that made me not like him even more than I didn’t already.

  There were all kinds of interesting things to see along the roadside and on the different farms we passed, such as horses and cattle and sheep and hogs and trees, which, with so much snow on them, looked like great white ghosts. Snowdrifts were piled everywhere. They looked like a lot of big rocks and little hills with white blankets on them.

  Poetry, who was very good in arithmetic, was making up problems all along the way and counting cows and sheep. When we passed Mr. Jesperson’s farm, there were a lot of cows standing very close together in the barnyard. There were so many of them that it looked as if there were maybe a hundred altogether. Our horses were going so fast, and everybody was yelling and talking so loud, that I could hardly hear Poetry say, “Look! There are seventy-nine cows!”

  I looked, and we were already passing the big red barn, so I said, “You can’t count that fast. They’re too close together to count ’em!”

  “There were seventy-nine,” Poetry said, and he sounded so sure I almost believed him.

  Soon we came to another farm, and there were what looked to be maybe a hundred hogs and sheep and cattle, all in the same big barnyard. Poetry nudged me and looked out at the animals and said, “See, Bill, I’m really good in arithmetic. There are twenty-seven sheep, thirty-four cows, and fifty-three hogs.”

  “You can’t count that fast,” I said.

  Little Jim piped up and said the same thing, and so did Dragonfly, who was always very poor in arithmetic.

&nbs
p; Well, we were coming to another farm where there were a lot of Holstein milk cows out in the barnyard. Holsteins are black-and-white cows, which give lots of milk but with not as much cream on it as the milk of Jersey or Guernsey cows.

  There looked to be maybe thirty cows, but as fast and as carefully I counted, I couldn’t possibly be sure how many there were.

  But Poetry squawked in his ducklike voice, “There are thirty-three Holstein cows, and in the pen beside the silo,” he finished, “are forty-one pigs.”

  “Keep still!” I said to him. “Don’t remind me of school. I want to forget it.”

  Circus looked at me—I was all slouched down on one elbow—and he said, “Hey, Long, sit up!”

  And I yelled back at him, for he was sitting up pretty straight against the corner of the other end of the wagon box, “I’ll sit up if you’ll shut up!” except that I wouldn’t, and I didn’t, but I knew Circus was only kidding me.

  Soon we would be coming to the Collins farm, and my dad’s cows and sheep and horses and hogs would be out there for Poetry to count. It always felt good to get near our house. The great red barn, the old iron pump at the end of the walk not far from the ordinary-looking house, and the big walnut tree close by, where in the summertime the gang had a high swing, the woodshed—just looking at it all gave me a homesick feeling.

  But almost right away I didn’t feel very happy, because Shorty Long, who was sitting beside Dragonfly and talking Openglopish with him, raised his voice and yelled to me, “Is that where you live, William?”

  I didn’t want to answer, and I didn’t, but somebody else’s voice did. Some girl’s voice, I think it was, but I couldn’t tell whose. She said, “Sure, that’s where he lives.”

  Then Shorty Long yelled out loud enough for everybody to hear and said, “In that funny-looking little red house?” And he pointed toward our red-painted woodshed.

  I was boiling inside at him anyway for calling me “William” and for reminding me of Mr. Black, when he said, “Look, girls, there’s where William Collins lives—in that little red house. Some boys’ fathers keep them in the woodshed so much they actually live there.”