Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 7-12

by Paul Hutchens

  Well, I must have had a premonition, because I kept feeling that there was something very important on the inside of that brown envelope.

  On the way back to the school, some of us talked to Mrs. Jesperson and said, “We don’t like our new teacher. We’d rather have you again!”

  She just smiled at us and called us all to attention. And while the horses were trotting along and the sleigh bells were jingling and jangling, she said to us, “Boys and girls of the Sugar Creek school—”

  Everything was quiet except for the sound of the sled runners in the snow, and the bells ringing, and Dragonfly’s sneezing, which he was doing again on account of his still being allergic to the oats straw in the wagon. Most of the straw got dumped out in the accident, but enough of it was still on our blankets and rugs to make him sneeze.

  Then Mrs. Jesperson said, “Mr. Jesperson and I are going to be missionaries, as some of you know. That’s the real reason I resigned from teaching. Also, some of you know that we have already finished our missionary training.

  “You will be interested to know that our good friend Mr. Seneth Paddler, whom you boys affectionately call ‘Old Man Paddler,’ has undertaken to support both of us while we are on the mission field.”

  Mrs. Jesperson waited a minute while a lot of us asked questions, and then just as we were getting close to our school again, she said, “Some of you have said you don’t like Mr. Black. But I’m sure you will like him just as soon as you get better acquainted with him. Be sure to obey him in everything and be as kind and gentlemanly as possible. I am sure you will have a very happy year together. Remember that he does not know you as I have known you, and at first he may not understand you. Please be loyal to the principles of the Sugar Creek School, which have been yours for years.

  “I think it was very generous and thoughtful of Mr. Black to let us have this time together. Also I think it was very courteous and thoughtful and unselfish of him to let me have you all to myself for this farewell visit together.”

  Just about that time I began to feel a great big lump of something in my throat. I felt very sad that I was not going to get to see her again for a long time, still not being sure I liked Mr. Jesperson very well for marrying her and taking her away from us. Also I felt for a second or two that I might get to like Mr. Black a little bit, and I made up my mind that I was going to try to be even a better boy than I was.

  Well, I won’t take time to tell you right now about how sad we all felt and that some of the girls cried and hugged Mrs. Jesperson. All of the Sugar Creek Gang would have felt bashful if we’d done that, so we just shook hands with her instead.

  All of us went back into the schoolhouse, and school started again and lasted until recess without anybody getting into any trouble, and Mr. Black behaved very well for a new teacher.

  At recess, which would last for fifteen minutes, we planned to have a gang meeting, which we had in the woodshed, with Shorty Long not being allowed to come inside. Dragonfly wouldn’t come in either when he found out we wouldn’t let Shorty in. It looked as if for the first time we were going to have trouble in our own gang.

  I felt terrible when the gang shut the door and locked it on the inside. I knew that somewhere out in the schoolyard Shorty Long and our Dragonfly were talking Openglopish and maybe talking about us, and it looked as if Shorty Long was going to break up our gang if we didn’t do something about it. I still couldn’t help but feel that there was something in that brown envelope that would be very important. In fact, it might be so important that it would, whatever it was, cause us a lot of trouble!

  6

  It was sort of dark in the woodshed with the door shut, on account of there not being any window. All the light there was came in through a crack up near the roof at the other end, just above the top of the big pile of wood that was piled high against the wall.

  Big Jim sat down in front of us on a block of wood, and the rest of us sat on a long bench that used to be a recitation bench in the school-house itself. There were also two or three battered desks in the woodshed, some of them with initials carved on the tops by maybe some boy who should have known better. I was looking at one desktop, and it had B.C. on it, which are my initials. I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw it, wondering who had done it, not remembering whether I had done it or not, and sort of remembering maybe I had, but that was a long time ago when I was little and didn’t know much better.

  Well, Big Jim called the meeting to order and said, while all the rest of us kept quiet, “All right, Poetry, let’s have a look at Shorty Long’s personal property.”

  Big Jim’s saying that made me remember what had happened that morning in school, and my ears started to burn.

  Big Jim took the small brown envelope that Poetry handed him and sat very quiet, looking at the outside. Then with a dignified voice like a judge in a courtroom, Big Jim said to Poetry, “You found this in a snowdrift, is that right?”

  “Yes, sir,” Poetry said.

  “Has anybody seen this before?” was Big Jim’s next question, and I said, “Yes, sir, I saw it.”

  “Where?”

  “I saw Shorty Long showing it to Dragonfly while we were in the sled just before we had our wreck.”

  “Have you seen the inside of it?” Big Jim asked.

  “Not yet,” I said, meaning I wanted to see what was in it right away.

  Big Jim sat there with a puzzled face, while we waited for him to decide what he was going to do. At the same time he was doing what boys nearly always try to do when they are sitting on something that isn’t very solid or isn’t fastened to the floor. He was balancing himself on the standing-up block of wood, like it was a three-legged chair, one chair leg being the block of wood he was half sitting on, the other two legs being his own, which were in front of him.

  Big Jim held up the envelope so that the light from the crack in the woodshed behind him would shine on it. Then he shook it, and I could hear it rattle like a package of watermelon seeds my mom sometimes buys at a seed store in town in the spring.

  Then Big Jim got a sober face and said, using very dignified words as though he was talking to dignified people, which he wasn’t, “As much as I would like to open this and see what is in it, I cannot do so, because as was decided in school session this morning, personal property is personal property—”

  At that remark, Poetry snickered in a very undignified way, but several of us shushed him. He kept still, and Big Jim went on.

  “On the other hand,” Big Jim said, still talking as though we were dignified people, “if we did not know whose property this was, it would be lawful to open the envelope and examine its contents and—”

  Well, for once I was glad that even though Big Jim was talking in a very dignified voice, he wasn’t sitting in a dignified way on that block of wood. He was, in fact—maybe without knowing he was doing it—every now and then lifting both feet off the woodshed floor and trying to balance himself on the rather thin block of wood.

  Anyway, Poetry, being very mischievous and not being able to help it, all of a sudden let one of his big feet shoot out in front of him and give the block of wood a shove, and there was a scrambling shuffle that ended in Big Jim’s being upset and tumbling over in several different directions at the same time and landing in a very undignified sprawl at our feet.

  It was actually funny, and we started to laugh—until I saw what had happened. His hands reached out in several different directions at the same time to balance himself, and didn’t, and the brown envelope got turned upside down in the shuffle. And right in front of my eyes I saw everything that was in it scattered over the woodshed floor.

  There was the personal property of Shorty Long right in front of the eyes of all of us. It was a lot of pictures about the size of small snapshots, and also what looked like a boy’s drawing of several persons, which, now that we’d been in the dark awhile and could see better, I could see. And I saw my name at the bottom of one of the drawings, and it was spe
lled “PILL Collins.”

  Well, I remembered what Shorty Long had called me that morning on the way to school, when he said, “From now on your name is just plain Pill Collins. Pill, as in caterpillar.”

  In seconds, Big Jim had scrambled to his feet and had all those pictures in one hand and the brown envelope in the other—all except that drawing with my name on it, which somehow I had picked up myself and was looking at.

  And I tell you that what I saw made me feel hot all over. It made me so mad at Shorty Long—I can’t even tell you what the drawing looked like, except that it had a picture of somebody who looked very homely, and my name was under it, and I was carrying a lunch box that was colored with red crayon, and beside me was a very homely girl named Lucille Browne, Circus’s sister. And right below my name were some words in quotation marks, which meant I was supposed to be saying them, and they were filthy words, even dirtier than the mud in our barnyard looks in the spring after a hard rain.

  Then, beside my picture I saw one that was just as homely, and it had Big Jim’s name under it, and beside him was a girl …

  I didn’t get to see what the words were under Big Jim’s name because Big Jim took it and looked at it quick, then shoved it and everything else back inside the envelope as though it was something especially dirty and he didn’t want to even touch it.

  Just that second I heard a snowball go ker-wham against the woodshed door, and then another and another and another. And before thinking, I yelled, “Hey, you out there! Stop it!” I was out of my place in a fierce hurry. I leaped to the woodshed door, unhooked it, shoved it open, and looked out to see who had dared to attack us.

  The very second I opened the door, one of my eyes got pasted shut with a snowball, which, before it struck me, I could see had been thrown by a big lummox of a guy whose name was Shorty Long.

  Well, I’d had one fight with him before Christmas, and he had licked me for a while. And we had had another one that very morning on the way to school, and I had licked him, so I knew I could do it. And since I was already mad at him and since he had just pasted me ker-wham in the face with a snowball, I was still madder, especially on account of what was in the brown envelope.

  So I made a dive for the snow with both hands, made a hard snowball real quick, dodging several of his at the same time, and the fight was on. I threw my ball whizzety-sizzle toward Shorty Long, who ducked behind the snow fort the gang had made beside the big maple tree that morning before school. My ball hit ker-thud-wham against the front of the fort.

  “Come on, gang!” I yelled to the guys, who were tumbling out of the door behind me. “Let’s wash his face with snow!”

  Shorty Long was already interrupting what I was saying, so maybe the gang didn’t hear me. He was yelling, “William Collins lives in the woodshed! William Collins lives in the woodshed!”

  By then all of us—even Little Jim, who liked to be kind to everybody even when he was angry at them—were on our way past the old iron pump not far from the narrow gate that opened into the schoolyard, straight for Shorty Long’s snow fort, which wasn’t his fort anyway. We’d made it ourselves.

  Before any of us got to the fort, all of us had thrown maybe a half-dozen snowballs apiece, which we had made on the way, and Shorty Long had thrown several at us, one of which had hit me kersmash-squish, right in the face.

  Also, Dragonfly was scooping up snowballs and throwing them at us. Imagine that! One of the members of the Sugar Creek Gang playing traitor and throwing snowballs at the rest of the gang and fighting against us! I could hardly believe my eyes—the one good eye that I had left!

  And then another snowball hit me ker-thud-smash-squish right on the chin. For a few seconds, I couldn’t see straight. But when I saw Shorty Long again, he was holding both hands up to his face and ears. With the Sugar Creek Gang’s snowballs pelting him all over, he was running toward the door of the schoolhouse.

  “He’s going to tell the teacher on you,” Dragonfly cried. His voice sounded as if he wanted Shorty Long to do that and also wanted Mr. Black to take Shorty Long’s part.

  Well, I grabbed two or three hard snowballs from behind the fort, snowballs that Shorty and Dragonfly had made and piled up there while we were having our gang meeting in the woodshed. Boy, those balls were hard. I could tell that without thinking. I whirled and let them go quick, one, two, three, bang-sock-wham, straight toward Shorty Long and the school-house door toward which he was running.

  And that’s when even more trouble started.

  Right that minute, the only door to the schoolhouse burst open, and one of my snowballs went whizzing in to smash ker-squash right in the center of Mr. Black’s bald head—he having stooped the moment he opened the door to straighten the doormat.

  Imagine that crazy snowball missing Shorty Long and socking our new teacher right in the center of his bald head.

  I felt hot and cold and numb. I stood there, mixed up in my mind, then turned and ran like a scared rabbit straight for the woodshed door and dived in. Before I could shut the door, all the gang except Dragonfly was scrambling in after me.

  Panting and gasping for breath and sweating and scared, we slammed the door tight. We stood there with our fists doubled up, trembling and waiting for anything to happen. It seemed dark inside again on account of our having been out in the bright light of day for a while.

  “Sh! Listen!” Poetry said, which we were all doing anyway, but when he said that, we listened harder. And sure enough, we heard the schoolhouse door slam shut. Also we heard steps coming in our direction.

  I shoved Poetry aside and looked through a narrow crack in the door right next to the white knob, and it was Mr. Black. He had his big black fur cap on and his black overcoat, which I thought would look pretty with about seven snowballs decorating it like a lot of white stars in the sky above Sugar Creek in the summertime.

  Maybe I thought that because I was seeing stars myself on account of Shorty Long’s snowballs in my face.

  I’d never seen a man’s face so set and so mad-looking, I thought. I turned around quick, looked up toward the two-by-six beams that ran across the middle of the shed about three feet above our heads, and wondered if it would do any good to climb up there.

  “Sh!” Big Jim said. “Everybody keep still!”

  Closer and closer those steps came, straight for the woodshed door, behind which we all, except Dragonfly, were.

  “All right, gang,” Big Jim ordered us, “everybody against the door! Brace your feet!”

  And we obeyed Big Jim.

  7

  It’s a strange feeling being scared and mad and wondering what is going to happen and what if it does.

  Crunch, crunch, crunch, faster and faster those big heavy steps of our baldheaded schoolteacher came straight for the woodshed door. All of us were right behind Big Jim and Circus, who were braced against the door so that nobody could get it open.

  “Stop grunting!” Big Jim ordered some of us who were grunting. We were pushing hard without needing to yet. The door was the kind that opened inside.

  “There he is—sh!” Circus said. He had his eye on the crack in the door. “Keep still!”

  We kept still and waited and listened. I could hear all of us breathing and could hear my heart pounding.

  Little Jim had his two small hands up against my brown sweater, with his feet braced behind him. He was probably pale. I felt sorry for him, because he never did like to have any trouble of any kind, and never would fight unless he had to, and was the best Christian in the whole gang. He wasn’t a sissy either. He could knock home runs on our ball team. He actually shot a bear one time, which would have killed all of us maybe if he hadn’t. And the way he had fought when a tough town gang had tried to lick the Sugar Creek Gang was something great. He had a temper that was better than mine, too, because he didn’t let it explode and wasn’t always saying things he was sorry for afterward the way some of us were some of the time.

  “What’s that?” Little To
m Till hissed. “What’s he trying to do?”

  We were still listening, and then I heard it too. Mr. Black was fumbling at the lock of the door and at the latch. I could hear—and then a funny feeling grabbed me as I heard something go clickety-click-snap. It sounded like—and then I knew what it was.

  Even before I could say it, Poetry said it for me in his squawky voice. “He’s locked the door! We can’t get out!”

  After Poetry said that, everything was quiet outside except for one thing, and that one thing was heavy crunching footsteps going away from the door, past the woodshed, down past the fox-and-goose ring that we had made in the snow in the west end of our big schoolyard.

  Big Jim unhooked the door, grabbed the white doorknob, turned it, and tried to pull open the door, and couldn’t.

  “Let me try it,” I said.

  He did, and I did, and the knob would turn, but that was all. We all knew what had happened. Mr. Black had brought the big new Yale lock, which we always used at night to lock the woodshed door so thieves wouldn’t steal the wood, and had locked us in!

  And that gives you a stranger feeling than being mad and scared and wondering if you’re going to get a licking.

  “He’s locked us in!” we all said almost at the same time.

  And he really had. The only way we could get out now would be to break out, because there wasn’t any window in the woodshed. And we didn’t dare break out, because that would be damaging school property, and we could have trouble with the law if we did that. So there we were, and what would happen next I didn’t know.

  “Hey! Gang!” somebody called to all of us. I looked around, and there was Circus, up on the wood that was piled high against the other wall. He was looking through a crack in the direction Mr. Black’s crunching steps had gone. You should have seen us all scrambling up over those different kinds of short fireplace logs—oak and ironwood and elm and sycamore and ash and willow and maple and all kinds of wood from the different kinds of trees that grew along Sugar Creek.