Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 7-12

by Paul Hutchens

  But Circus seemed to know. He whispered, “It was maybe too big a possum to carry, so he’s skinning it and will throw the carcass over in the swamp. Then he’ll just carry the pelt, which won’t be very heavy.” A pelt was an undressed fur skin.

  “You kids stay here,” Big Jim ordered most of us, “and Circus and I’ll sneak up and see if that’s what he is doing. We’ve got to know if he’s the one who’s been stealing from Circus’s dad’s traps.”

  “How about my suitcase and the letter?” I said. “Find out if it’s Shorty Long’s dad.”

  I didn’t think it was fair for Circus and Big Jim to get to go without the rest of us, especially me, because I was still mad. And I could just imagine myself sneaking up on whoever it was and then, when Big Jim gave the signal, all of us diving in headfirst and grabbing him and getting him down and sitting on him and being heroes the way we had been when we caught the robber.

  But there wasn’t any use for me to wish it.

  “All you guys have got to do is to keep still,” Big Jim ordered us under his breath. “We’ll sneak around on the other side of him, come up from behind the big fir tree, and find out who it is.”

  “Then what?” I asked.

  “That’s enough to know now,” Big Jim whispered back. “I don’t know yet myself.”

  It didn’t help matters any for Big Jim to say that. In fact, when he said he didn’t know himself, that started my mind off to thinking and planning and scheming what we’d better do.

  It was certainly hard to keep still. I could see Circus and Big Jim’s shadows as they moved off to the right, getting ready to make a wide circle around the man on the log. Pretty soon they got too far for us to see in the falling snow, and all we could do was wait, and keep still, and feel weird inside every time we heard a noise that sounded like Circus or Big Jim stepping on a stick that snapped or stumbling over something.

  Little Jim was holding onto my arm with his mittened hands. I could still smell the skunk a little on his stick, but not much.

  It felt good to have Little Jim snuggle up close to me, because I was bigger than he was and I thought maybe it made him feel braver to be there. It also made me feel braver when I thought that maybe he felt braver because of me. And while I was thinking that, I felt as if I could lick anybody, anywhere, any size, just to protect Little Jim from getting hurt. He was such a great little guy. My dad is always thinking important things and, as I’ve already told you, knows the Bible real well. He told me one day, “Having Little Jim in the Sugar Creek Gang helps give the gang a conscience.”

  I couldn’t understand what Dad meant, and I still don’t very well. But he explained that Little Jim is always there to tell the gang when they are about to do something they shouldn’t. And after the gang has done something wrong, Little Jim feels terribly sad, just like your conscience when you do wrong.

  I knew Dad was right, as he usually is, even though I don’t always understand.

  Anyway right that minute, while Big Jim and Circus were creeping around and up on that guy on the log, and while Poetry and Dragonfly and Little Jim and I were waiting, and while Little Jim was holding onto my arm, I began to feel just a little bit sorry for the man, whoever he was, because he was going to have to get beat up on by all of us.

  “Sh!” Poetry whispered. “Look! He’s drinking something out of a bottle!”

  We looked, and that is what it looked like— a big bottle of something flashed in the light of his lantern for a second.

  “Maybe it’s his lunch. Maybe he’s drinking out of his thermos bottle,” Little Jim said, which shows he never liked to think bad things about people if he could help it. He’d rather think a guy was drinking milk or cocoa or coffee out of a thermos than that he was drinking whiskey.

  Then Dragonfly said something that made me feel sad.

  “Maybe it is Circus’s pop. Maybe he decided to come home and run his traplines tonight before the snow covers everything up. Maybe that’s him on the log skinning his own possum, and maybe he’s drinking whiskey again.”

  “Absolutely not,” I said, angry. “Circus’s dad was converted, wasn’t he? Didn’t he get saved in those evangelistic meetings? How could he get drunk if he is a Christian?”

  “He might backslide,” Poetry said.

  “What’s that?” Dragonfly asked, knowing less than most any of the gang about the Bible.

  “That’s when a person who has become a Christian turns his back on the church—and— and—on the Lord and gets bad again,” Little Jim said.

  We didn’t have time to whisper anything else, because just then we heard a noise up there ahead of us. The man on the log looked up, grabbed his lantern, jumped to his feet, and started to run in our direction. The first thing he did, though, was to stumble over the log and fall down, get up quick and awkward-like, and start right toward us again.

  We heard Big Jim and Circus yelling on the other side of him, “Stop, thief! Hey, gang! Bill! Poetry! Stop him!”

  Well, there the four of us littlest guys were, without either Big Jim or Circus to help us, and the man, whoever he was, was running in our direction, waving his lantern in front of him to see his way and stumbling along as though he was drunk toward the fir tree behind which we were hiding.

  I guessed what he was going to try to do. He was going to make a dive for the mouth of the cave, which was just about fifty feet to the left of us, and in order to get to it he would have to pass the fir tree where we were.

  I don’t know how I ever managed to think straight, but I must have, because I heard myself saying to the guys with me, “Wait’ll he gets here, and then all four of us dive out and tackle him football style.”

  Boy, oh, boy, I certainly couldn’t think straight, but it suddenly seemed, with Big Jim and Circus gone, that I was the leader of our little gang. So I felt very brave, in spite of being scared, and was all set to be the first one to grab the man when he got to where we were.

  But I didn’t even have a chance to be a hero—not the first one, anyway. We were all crouched there waiting when, all of a sudden, as the man got close enough, Little Jim shot out from beside me and shoved his stick right between the man’s flying legs.

  Ker-whamety-squash-squash-flop. The guy fell right in front of us in a tangled-up sprawl. His lantern flew out of his hand as he tried to catch himself, and in an instant we were all on top of him. Big Jim and Circus got there in a split second.

  It didn’t take long for all of us to be right in the middle of one of the fiercest wrestling fights we’d ever had—at least the fiercest one we’d had for a long time. Not since the fight we’d had in this same place about a year ago, when we caught the bank robber, had I heard so much swearing and grunting and groaning as I heard right that minute. Even while I was holding on like a bulldog to the man’s right leg, Circus was holding onto his other leg, and Poetry and Big Jim and Little Jim and Dragonfly were tumbling all over him and getting socked by the man’s fists every now and then before we could get him under control.

  Even while we were doing all that, I was sorry that Little Jim had to be there; because, honestly, I’d never heard a man swear so much in my life. The words that came out of his mouth were actually worse to hear than the mud in our barnyard looks in the spring when the ground has begun to thaw out after a long winter.

  The swearing was terrible, and if there is anything Little Jim can’t stand more than anything else it is to hear somebody swear. Little Jim not only knows it is wrong to swear, but he has a special reverence for the Bible and for the One who is the main character in it.

  It didn’t take us long to get that guy down, all of us sitting and half lying on his legs and arms and on him himself. I hadn’t even had time to decide who he was. Of course, I couldn’t see his face, but I’d heard his voice and the swear words, and it was the voice of somebody who lived in the Sugar Creek neighborhood, I was sure, because I’d heard that voice before a good many times. In fact it seemed that every time I’d heard
it before, it had been swearing.

  All of a sudden, Dragonfly, panting for breath even worse than he sometimes does when he is in a fight, said, “It’s—it’s—hey, gang! It’s John Till! He’s out of jail again!”

  And that was who it was. I knew it the minute Dragonfly said it, and it made what we were doing seem terribly important. The last any of us had seen of old John Till, he had been on the way to jail. Boy, oh, boy, oh, boy! Here we were catching a jailbird just as if we were real detectives or the FBI or somebody else important! It surely felt good, even though the snowdrift we had caught him in was pretty cold and didn’t feel like anybody’s nice, big, soft, warm featherbed.

  For some reason, though, I wasn’t very glad. Maybe it was because I knew that John Till was Little Tom Till’s dad, and Little Tom was a great little guy, who had joined our gang and even came to our Sunday school. But the man was Big Bob Till’s dad too. And as you already know, Big Bob was a real tough guy and Big Jim’s worst enemy and was always causing the gang trouble when he used to live in our neighborhood.

  The first time I’d ever seen John Till was one summer when he was working in my dad’s oat field and had tried to give Circus’s dad some whiskey to drink. That very day Circus and I had had a fight with him. I’d had the living daylights knocked out of me right in the middle of the fight too, or rather at the end of it, because for some reason the fight didn’t last very long after I got licked.

  And then we heard a high-pitched, quavering old voice saying from behind us somewhere, “Hello, boys! What’s going on here? What are you doing out here in the snow?”

  Even before I could think, I knew who it was, and something inside of me just bubbled up with happiness. It was the voice of the kindest old man in the world, long-whiskered Old Man Paddler himself, the best grown-up friend the Sugar Creek Gang ever had. I knew that he had just come out of the mouth of the cave by the sycamore tree, because the other end of the long cave came out in the basement of his cabin way up in the hills. He’d probably got tired waiting for us to come and had decided to come to the mouth of the cave to wait for us. Maybe it was way past time for us to meet him as we were supposed to at seven o’clock.

  I looked up at him. He was carrying an old-fashioned kerosene lantern that had a shield at the back so that the light came out just at the front and sides. His whiskers were as white as the snow itself and reached down to the place where his belt probably was. He had on a coat and probably wore suspenders, which old men nearly always do.

  He was wearing his thick-lensed glasses, I noticed, and had a cane hanging in the crook of his arm, and in his hand was something that looked like—like a—why it was! It was my little brown suitcase!

  Before I could cry out to the gang and tell them what I’d seen, the old man said, “Mighty nice of you boys to come to meet me. I was afraid I couldn’t go because I might get lost at night. I don’t see so very well at night anymore. Why—what’s that? Is somebody hurt?”

  It was old hook-nosed John Till, gasping and saying, “Let me up, you little roughnecks! Get off of me. Get off!”

  6

  When I looked up and saw that kind old man with his gray-brown raccoonskin cap on his fine head with its high forehead and the smile that I could imagine he had on his face— I wasn’t able to see his smile because of his whiskers—I had a sort of guilty feeling as if I had either done something wrong or else was doing it right that minute.

  That old man hates wickedness worse than anything. He loves our wonderful country and is very patriotic and wants everybody to obey the law. He is always wishing nobody made or sold liquor of any kind, especially whiskey, because it spoils so many lives and breaks so many hearts. Yet I knew that he wouldn’t want us to hurt old John Till but would rather we would be kind to him.

  There were so many things to think about right that second, and I didn’t have time to think about a one of them. There was Mr. Black, our teacher, who had galloped away on his horse and who would maybe have it in for the whole gang of us the next day at school. There in Old Man Paddler’s hand was my little brown suitcase, which had my pajamas in it and, I hoped, Poetry’s mom’s beautiful new brooch, which she had left at our house. There was the letter, which somebody had stolen from me and which had said that I was a roughneck and that the whole Sugar Creek Gang was a bunch of roughnecks. And there was the wrestling fight we had been having with old John Till, whose leg I still was holding onto. So I didn’t have time to think about much of anything.

  Also I knew we probably ought to get going with Old Man Paddler to Poetry’s house, where all our parents were waiting for us and wondering what on earth had happened to us.

  Right that minute John Till started squirming and kicking, or rather trying to, and twisting and grunting and swearing and calling us names. His voice was pretty muffled, because he was down on his stomach, and his face was probably mixed up in snow.

  The gang was grunting, too, I tell you.

  Circus must have felt as I did about what Old Man Paddler would maybe think we were doing and shouldn’t have been, because he said to the old man from between his gritted teeth, “He’s been stealing my dad’s fur from his traps, and we caught him at it. He was skinning a possum which he took out of a trap up on Bumblebee hill!”

  Poetry piped up. “He stole my mother’s beautiful new brooch.”

  And I chimed in between grunts, “And my suitcase and a letter, and he called us a bunch of roughnecks!”

  John Till let out a roar, made a mighty heave of his body, shoved out his arms, and tried to push us all off. But he couldn’t, so he yelled, “I did not. You’re a bunch of liars! Let me up, I tell you, or I’ll—I’ll—”

  Whatever it was he wanted to do to us, we knew he wouldn’t get a chance to do it unless we gave him a chance, and we weren’t going to do that, no sir!

  Big Jim, who was sprawled across John Till’s shoulders, holding him down with all his strength, cut in then and said fiercely, “John Till! We’re not letting you up! Understand? We’re going to tie your hands behind you, and you’re going to walk along with us until we get to Poetry’s house. Then we’re taking you in somebody’s car to town and back to jail.”

  John Till let out a couple of fierce swear words and said, “You’re not taking me to anybody’s jail. I’ve been in jail enough in my life!”

  “You are going to jail!” Big Jim said to him through his teeth. “We caught you stealing out of Circus’s dad’s traps, and that’s where you’re going!”

  Well, I don’t know what we would have done with John Till if Old Man Paddler’s kind voice hadn’t broken in then and said, “Listen, boys, listen!”

  For a minute everything was quiet, and I had a feeling that the old man was going to say something very important. He was sort of like my dad, always saying things that were different. Since he was a good Christian and lived like one all the time, I knew he would maybe say something about the Bible. And sure enough, he did. It made me wish I could think of things like that instead of always wanting to beat up on somebody.

  Anyway, this is what that kind, quavering, high-pitched old voice said: “He deserves punishment, boys, but he doesn’t need to be punished nearly so much as he needs to be changed. He needs to hear the gospel, and maybe he needs somebody to be kind to him.”

  Then Old Man Paddler changed his tone of voice and talked straight to John Till himself. All of us, including John Till, kept quiet to listen.

  This is what the old man said—and, wow, did he say it like he meant business, even though he used a kind voice: “John Till, you are out on parole. If I hadn’t believed you’d go straight, I wouldn’t have let them parole you to me. But I did believe it, and—”

  Even while Old Man Paddler was “talking turkey” to John Till, who had to listen whether he wanted to or not, I thought about what a kind person that old man really was. Imagine his going to the jail or to the judge or wherever he had gone and asking them to let John Till out and to parole him over to him!
It certainly showed that Old Man Paddler wasn’t always thinking about himself. Right then he was telling John Till things that maybe his own dad should have told him a long time ago, so he wouldn’t have grown up to be such a wicked man.

  Old Man Paddler was saying, “For the sake of your wife and your two boys, Bob and Tom, and for your own sake, John, you’ve got to go straight this time. If you have to go back to jail, it’ll mean a longer sentence and probably the state penitentiary for you. Then who’ll look after your family? Who’ll buy the groceries and clothes and shoes? No, John, now’s the time to go straight! You don’t have to steal to get money either. There’s plenty of work for you right here in Sugar Creek territory.”

  And John Till just sort of melted under the old man’s words like a chunk of ice would melt in a fire.

  Then Old Man Paddler finished talking to John Till and said to all of us, “You can let him up, boys! We’ll take him along with us to the Thompsons’.”

  And pretty soon all of us were up and knocking the snow off each other, looking around to see if any of us had lost anything, and getting ready to get going to Poetry’s house.

  The first thing I did was to get my suitcase from Old Man Paddler and open it to see if everything was in it and was all right, and it was.

  “Where in the world did you find it?” I asked him.

  “It was just inside the cave. I almost stumbled over it when I came out,” he said. “Some of you boys planning to stay at my cabin all night?”

  Dragonfly piped up then. “John Till stole it from Bill—grabbed it out of his hand at the entrance to Poetry’s lane—and stole a letter Bill had, and knocked the living daylights out of him, and shoved him into a snowdrift, and—”

  John Till had been standing sort of in a daze, as though he was hardly there, the way drunk men do sometimes. When he heard that, he came to life and said angrily “Th-that’s a lie!” And he made a lunge at Dragonfly.