Big Jim was saving the battery in Dad’s flashlight, so we just had Poetry’s lantern to see each other by. It had been smoking a little and had black soot at the top of its glass globe.
It was what Dragonfly said that got us started talking about Mr. Black, our teacher, again. We were all pretty worked up because of what had happened in school on our very first day after our Christmas vacation. It wasn’t easy to have to have a new teacher right in the middle of the winter—especially after we’d had such a nice pretty, kind woman teacher all the first half of the year.
“I still wish Miss Brown hadn’t resigned. I’d rather have her for our teacher any time than—”
Big Jim interrupted Dragonfly by clearing his throat real loud just before he said, “But she did. And we all have to make the best of it.”
“The worst of it, you mean,” Dragonfly said. What he said made most of us half giggle and also grunt as though we were disgusted.
“Where do you suppose he got that pretty saddle horse?” Circus said. “I wish I had a saddle like that. Did you see those stirrups? They were gold!”
“Yeah,” Poetry said, “and his spurs looked like they were solid gold too.”
“What do you s’pose he was doing out on horseback?” Circus asked.
“That’s what I’d like to know,” Dragonfly said.
“Maybe he’s out getting his exercise,” Big Jim guessed. “He’s from the city, you know, and lots of guys from the city ride horseback for exercise.”
“Looks like the horse was getting all the exercise,” Dragonfly said. He was more disgusted with Mr. Black than some of the rest of us because he had had more trouble that day than any of the rest of us, except for me.
Well, we couldn’t waste any more time talking about that kind of trouble. I felt pretty terrible because of having lost my suitcase and what was in it as well as the letter. I was getting ready to say something, when Poetry spoke up.
“What are we going to do tomorrow if he doesn’t behave like a good schoolteacher ought to?”
“You mean, what will he do if we don’t behave like good little boys ought to?” Dragonfly said sarcastically.
“He certainly thinks we are a bunch of roughnecks,” Big Jim said, and in the light of Poetry’s lantern his face was pretty grim. “I think our best plan is to prove to him that we are not. After all, he is our teacher, and it’s up to us to be respectful to him.”
Then we took a vote and decided that we should try to be good the next day, if we could. Dragonfly was the only one to vote no. But the motion carried, and we knew he’d try to behave himself too.
“He’s too suspicious of us,” Dragonfly said and sneezed again. “He acts like he thinks he can’t trust a one of us. And besides, I’m allergic to him.”
Big Jim said something then that was kind of a bright remark. He said, “Nearly all boys are allergic to behaving themselves in school.”
And Poetry spoke up and said, “Except Dragonfly. He thinks a new teacher is nothing to be sneezed at.” Which was not very funny.
But we had voted to try to behave ourselves the next day, even though I knew it wouldn’t be easy. I had a very stubborn feeling in my mind, which shouldn’t have been there. But it was, and I knew nearly all of us felt the same way. When a boy is good just because he has to be, he isn’t very good.
Dragonfly all of a sudden said, “Psst! I hear something!”
And whenever Dragonfly hears or sees or smells something, there is nearly always something to hear or see or smell.
The silence was pretty tense for a minute while we all listened, expecting to hear most anything. Then as plain as daylight, I heard a noise from up the hill. It sounded like somebody’s shoes in the snow, walking stealthily as if he was trying not to be heard.
I could feel my hair trying to stand up on end under my cap, and I looked quick at Little Jim, who was sitting close to Big Jim. His mouselike face was kind of pale. His lips were pressed together tight, and he was holding onto his stick, which was about the size of a man’s cane, as tight as anything.
Big Jim had my dad’s flashlight poised and pointed in the direction where we thought the sound had come from, but he hadn’t turned it on yet. Poetry had the lantern sitting on his knees and was wiping some of the snow off the little ledge that ran around the bottom of it. Circus and Dragonfly were on the same log I was on, so I couldn’t see what their faces looked like or guess what they were thinking. We were certainly a quiet gang for a change. I couldn’t hear a thing. There wasn’t a sound at all.
Big Jim whispered then, “Must have been a limb falling in the woods.”
Dead limbs nearly always fall from trees in the wintertime.
Or it might have been some wild animal, I thought. There were lots of raccoons, possums, skunks, and other furbearing animals that run around in the woods along Sugar Creek at night. Once there had been a bear, and we had killed it ourselves. That is, Little Jim had, with Big Jim’s rifle—but that’s another story you probably know about.
Big Jim had one finger up, meaning Keep on keeping still, everybody—which we did. I did notice Dragonfly nervously fumbling in his coat pocket for his handkerchief, and I knew he probably had smelled something.
“Ker-chew!” went Dragonfly, reminding me of the story of Peter Rabbit, which we had in our schoolbooks when we were little. Peter Rabbit was running away from the gardener and had jumped into a big can to hide. While he was in there, he had to sneeze. Then the gardener was after him again.
The very second Dragonfly sneezed, not having time to get his handkerchief out of his pocket in time to even muffle it a little bit, we heard something snap. It was just to the left of us, about twenty feet along the edge of the steep hill that dropped almost straight down from the woods above to Sugar Creek below. Then there was a strange squeaking and something that sounded like the rattling of a chain and a thrashing around.
Then, as quick almost as we had heard it, Dragonfly smelled it. In fact we all smelled it at the same time, and we knew what it was.
“It’s a skunk!” Dragonfly said. “I’m allergic to skunks!”
We all were.
You should have seen Circus come to life. His dad, as you know, was a hunter and was always catching skunks and raccoons and possums and muskrats in the wintertime to help make a living for his large family of all girls except his one boy, Circus. “My dad has a trap set in the old woodchuck den over there,” he said.
Circus acted as if he’d forgotten we were having a very important meeting to decide what to do about whoever had stolen my suitcase and the letter. He reached for my dad’s flashlight, which was in Big Jim’s hand and which Big Jim let him have, and as quick as a flash Circus had the flashlight turned on in the direction of the sound and the smell.
And then we all saw it at the same time, something black-and-white, right at the mouth of the old woodchuck den we all knew about. The gang knew where every woodchuck den was along Sugar Creek and also every den all over the whole Sugar Creek territory.
Well, it was that skunk getting caught in Circus’s dad’s trap that started us on the trail of the thief again. I guess we’d all really decided that whoever he was had climbed into the car and gone across the bridge and was maybe a dozen miles away right that minute. So we certainly were surprised when we saw his tracks again, and we certainly were glad, even though we were scared too. Anyway we found the trail again right after Circus had done what he did.
Circus got to his feet and, with the flashlight in his hand, turned to Little Jim and said, “Here, give me your stick. I’ll kill it so it won’t have to suffer in the trap.”
But Little Jim held onto his stick, saying, “No,” real stubbornly. “Whyn’t we let it loose instead of killing it?” he asked.
And Dragonfly said, “’Cause it’s worth eight dollars, and because Circus’s sisters have to have some new dresses.”
“New dresses made out of skunk fur?” Poetry squawked.
“Goose!” I
said. “He sells the skunk’s fur to a furrier and buys the dresses with the money.”
“Let me have it!” Circus said to Little Jim. “You don’t want it to suffer, do you? It probably got its foot or leg broken in the trap. If we leave it till morning when Dad comes, it’ll suffer all night and—”
Little Jim never could stand to see anything be hurt so he let Circus have the stick, which was a pretty ash stick, with the bark peeled off in strips around it, making it look like a big long piece of stick candy.
Anyway, that broke up our meeting, and most of the gang followed Circus partway to where he was going, all except for Little Jim and me. Little Jim didn’t want to see or hear the skunk being killed, so he held his hands over his ears to keep from hearing the sound when Circus helped it die.
It only took a minute before it was all over, and then you should have heard what happened right after that. Circus and Big Jim and Poetry and Dragonfly called Little Jim and me. They said, “Hey, Bill! Little Jim! Come quick! We’ve found the trail again. He’s going straight toward the old sycamore tree and the cave! Hurry up!”
And that’s what it looked like the thief was doing. There were tracks partly covered with the new fallen snow, leading away from the woodchuck den right up the side of the steep hill and along the ridge above Sugar Creek in the direction of the old sycamore tree.
Well, we knew that the sycamore marked the entrance to the Sugar Creek cave and that its other end was way back up in the hills in the basement of Old Man Paddler’s cabin. We still had plenty of time to get to that kind old man’s place before seven o’clock.
Little Jim had his stick again and was shoving it in and out of snowdrifts, trying to get the skunk “perfume” off of it so that, when he got home that night, his parents would let him take it in the house with him instead of having to leave it outside in their woodshed. Little Jim certainly was proud of that stick, and it was almost as good a friend as a dog would have been. Nearly every boy needs a stick or a dog or a slingshot to keep him company.
We hadn’t walked more than about a hundred yards toward the old sycamore tree when Big Jim and Circus, who were leading the way, swerved to the left a little, away from the creek, and headed out through the woods toward Bumblebee Hill. That’s where the gang had so many meetings in the summertime and also where there were strawberries. We’d licked a tough town gang once in a fierce fight there. Big Jim had licked Big Bob Till in that fight, and I’d licked the daylights out of little redheaded Tom Till. Big Bob certainly was a roughneck, and we were glad he didn’t live in Sugar Creek anymore.
The Till boys’ dad was a terribly mean person, too, and also a drunkard, but he was in jail. Little Tom was a great little guy and had joined our gang. He came to our Sunday school, which it takes a brave boy to do when his brother and his father almost hate God.
It seemed the Sugar Creek Gang always had some mean person to cause them trouble. Now it was Shorty Long and his dad. I was sure it was Shorty Long’s dad whose tracks we were following right that minute, because of the letter I’d had from him.
Little Jim and I were still together, so I said to him, “If ever a guy ought to be beat up on, that guy should for stealing my letter and the suitcase and—”
Little Jim surprised me by saying, “Let’s don’t beat up on him. Let’s be kind to him. My mom is trying to get his mom saved. His dad is terribly mean to her and—”
“I don’t think it was Shorty,” I said. “I think it was his dad!”
Whoever it was we were trailing must have changed his mind about being in a hurry the way he was before, for now he didn’t walk close to an oak or a cedar or fir or pine tree to hide his tracks but stayed out in the open.
“He wants the falling snow to cover his tracks,” Big Jim said and called us to hurry up. “See here—you can’t even see the hole in his shoe sole anymore.”
“He’s quit running, though,” Circus said. “He must not be scared.”
“They look like boot tracks to me,” Poetry said, when he dropped back beside Little Jim and me. He was having a hard time to keep up with the rest of us because of having to carry so much more weight than anyone else.
At the foot of Bumblebee Hill we passed the tree where Little Jim had killed the bear, and we started following the tracks up the hill. There was an old abandoned cemetery up there where Old Man Paddler’s wife was buried, and there were a lot of very old weather-beaten, old-fashioned tombstones. Old Man Paddler’s wife’s tombstone was the only new one in the whole cemetery.
Pretty soon we were up there, and the tracks led right past her tall stone.
Big Jim flashed his light on it for a minute, and we all saw the sculptured hand on it that had one finger pointing toward the sky. We saw the words right below it, which said “There Is Rest in Heaven.”
Old Man Paddler had had that carved on it during the past summer. Some other smaller tombstones were there too, which had the names of Old Man Paddler’s boys on them.
Then I let out a yell and said, “Hey, what in the—”
One of my boots had stepped into a wood-chuck hole, and I had gone all the way down to my knee. I remembered then that there were about a half-dozen woodchuck dens around there. I had accidentally stepped into one. Not only that, but the minute I stepped in, I felt something shut tight on my boot! I knew it must be another one of Circus’s dad’s traps, which he had set in nearly every woodchuck den in the territory.
But the gang didn’t pay any attention to me, because there was more excitement up ahead. So I got out of the den and the trap as quickly as I could and joined them.
There were a lot of half-covered snow tracks, and just outside another hole was a steel trap with its jaws closed. Nothing was in it except some long gray hairs, which looked like a possum’s fur, and also there was some blood.
All of a sudden we all straightened up and looked at each other.
“Your dad!” I said to Circus. “We’re on the wrong trail. It’s your dad’s tracks. He’s running his trapline tonight.”
“He is not,” Circus said. “He’s not at home. He—what—”
Circus’s fists doubled up, and I could see his jaw set. He held Poetry’s lantern close to the thrown trap and studied the whitish-gray fur caught in its jaws.
Somehow I felt that he was going to say something very important, which he did. He said, “Whoever he is, he not only stole Bill’s suitcase, but he is a poacher. He’s been running my dad’s trapline and taking out anything that’s been caught. The—why, the—the dirty—”
Then Circus raised his voice and cried to us, “Come on, gang, let’s hurry up and trail him. Dad’s been telling us he thought somebody was poaching, and now we know! We know!”
5
Now there were three of us who’d had something stolen by the guy, whoever he was, and not a one of us knew who.
“I’ll bet it is Shorty Long’s dad,” Circus said over his shoulder to Little Jim and me, who were still the last ones because Little Jim had the shortest legs of any of us and couldn’t keep up.
“What makes you think so?” Big Jim asked when he heard Circus say that.
“Because Pop began to miss things out of his traps about the same time Shorty’s family moved into the neighborhood. And nearly every time something had been stolen, it seemed like it was after a snowstorm when the tracks would be covered up, the way they are tonight. Boy, oh, boy, I’d hate to think what would happen if Pop would ever catch him at it. It’d be just too bad.”
We were walking fast, following those half-covered tracks, going back toward the cave at the sycamore tree again, because there, not far from the swamp, Circus’s dad had several muskrat traps set.
Pretty soon, while we were puffing along, panting and dodging bushes and trees and briars and brush piles, getting closer and closer to the swamp, we suddenly stopped. I bumped right square into Poetry, who was in front of me. He had stopped because Circus and Big Jim had stopped first, and I heard Big Jim say under hi
s breath, “Sh! Quiet!”
As quick as a flash, Circus, who had been carrying Poetry’s lantern, swung around toward us, holding the lantern up close to his face as though he was going to study it to see if it was all right. Then he pressed down on the little control lever that lifts the globe. He gave a fierce, quick blow, and out went the light. Also I noticed that Big Jim had turned off my dad’s flashlight, and not a one of us could see anyone else. It was pitch-dark, although the snow everywhere on the ground made it light enough so we could see that we were all there. But we looked like nothing but shadows.
“’S’matter?” I said.
Big Jim shushed us all again. And it was a rule in our gang that when Big Jim shushed us, we all shushed as best we could.
Then Big Jim said in a husky whisper, “Look, gang. Right over there at the edge of the swamp. See?”
There was something. About twenty feet off the side of the path that goes through the swamp, and not very far from the mouth of the cave, there was a light. Somebody was stooped over and doing something, but we couldn’t see what at first.
We could see him, but with our lights out he couldn’t see us at all, we were sure.
We all huddled close together when Big Jim told us to, so that we could hear what he was going to tell us.
I had a feeling that there was going to be some excitement again, like the kind we had had before at this very place. In fact, the man with the light was almost at the very same spot where we had once caught a bank robber a long time ago. It was also close to the place where Old Man Paddler had had his money buried under a swamp rosebush. We were sort of used to running into all kinds of mysteries and having fights and catching robbers and things, but I was always trembling inside every time we bumped into another exciting adventure.
Now that our eyes were getting more used to the darkness, I could see a little better. I could see that the man had a lantern that was shining on something he was doing. I couldn’t see very well, but—the way it looked to me— the lantern was probably standing on the ground behind a log. He was sitting on the log himself, and I couldn’t guess what he was doing.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 7-12 Page 27