Another thing that probably made me do it was that Little Jim was there. I knew that if it had been Little Jim, he wouldn’t have told on Shorty Long. So I decided I wouldn’t. Besides, Little Jim’s parents were really trying to get Shorty’s parents to go to church and to become Christians, which is the same as being saved. I knew it wouldn’t help any if I blabbed about Shorty’s throwing that snowball. It would be better for Shorty to confess it himself.
There wasn’t a one of the girls who had seen Shorty do it—only some of the gang who were there. So I started toward the schoolyard gate, shuffled awkwardly past the old iron pump where we all got our drinking water, and was almost to the porch when Dragonfly, who liked me a lot, yelled to Mr. Black, “Mr. Black, Bill didn’t throw—”
That was as far as he got. I whirled around quick and yelled “Keep still!”
And Dragonfly kept still.
I went on into the schoolhouse ahead of everybody else, all by myself.
9
It didn’t feel very good to have to go into our one-room schoolhouse all alone, not knowing what might happen to me. I felt sick in the pit of my stomach. But I hadn’t any more than taken my seat when I heard Mr. Black say at the door behind me, “All right, all you boys of the Sugar Creek Gang, come on in, all of you. The rest of you may play or do anything you like. Hurry up.”
There certainly wasn’t any mad scramble as there sometimes is when the gang makes a dive for the one and only door of the schoolhouse. Instead, it took almost a whole minute for all the gang to get in. For a while it seemed there was a fight with words out there, for I heard one of the gang say, “You are not! You never joined! You can’t go in! He wants just the Sugar Creek Gang!” “Aw, let him come in if he wants to.” That was Dragonfly’s voice, I knew, and I guessed he and maybe Poetry were in a word fight. One of them was trying to keep Shorty Long from coming in because he didn’t belong to the gang, and the other one was trying to let him in. Dragonfly was the only one of the gang who kind of liked Shorty Long. Then I heard Shorty say, “I’m coming in! I don’t want to stay out here with all these crazy girls.”
Well, I didn’t like most girls very well, but I still didn’t want anybody to call them crazy. I had a baby sister, and my mother used to be a girl herself. Besides, Circus had one sister who wasn’t even a little bit crazy, and she was the main reason that Shorty Long and I had had a fight the day before.
Mr. Black decided it for us when he said, “All of the boys come on in and hurry up.”
In they all came, going to their different-sized seats in different parts of the room, and Mr. Black went to the front.
I could see behind him, just above his head, the switches he had cut yesterday and had put on a little ledge above the maps of the world. He had a very set face. He stood there looking out over the room at all of us until we were very quiet. I could feel that something was coming—something very interesting but something I was afraid I wouldn’t like very well.
Then he spoke, and I certainly was surprised at how calm his voice was, even though it didn’t sound very friendly. “We will forget about the snowball William Collins threw at me a minute ago. What I want to do now is something else. I need to know something. In the first place, I’m having it understood right now that I am running this school. I am not going to have a gang of boys throwing snowballs at me, insulting me, and writing threatening letters!”
What? I thought. What does he mean by that? What does he know about a threatening letter?
He stopped and looked at all of us, letting his sharp bluish-gray eyes flash from one to the other of us. Our faces must have looked blank to him from what he said after that. Mine couldn’t have been very blank though, for I was wondering how he knew someone had written a threatening letter and shoved it into our mailbox.
“Well?” he said, with a question mark on the end of his voice and on his face. “Don’t look so innocent. Which one of you boys wrote this?”
I looked up at him, and in his hand he was holding an envelope that was the same size and looked exactly like the one that somebody had put in our mailbox, and which somebody had knocked out of my hand at Poetry’s lane, and which Poetry had found that morning, and which we had showed to Shorty Long.
I quickly shoved my hand into my pocket to see if I still had my letter, and I did. Yet there it was in Mr. Black’s hand right in front of our eyes! He was still looking at us and especially at me, when he said, “Which one of you boys wrote this?” And when nobody answered, he said, “Speak up! Who wrote this?”
Not a one of us spoke up, and I certainly didn’t know what to think.
Big Jim raised his hand then, as a boy does in school when he wants to say something or ask something.
Mr. Black looked at him as though he couldn’t believe his eyes, and then said, “I’m certainly surprised at you, James! You, of all persons! Will you step up here to the platform, please?”
Big Jim dropped his hand and said, “I never saw it before. I raised my hand because I wanted to ask you to let us see it.”
Mr. Black grunted and looked at us all again the way maybe a bear would look at a boy or a gang of boys it would be glad to eat up.
“I suppose you boys know that you can all be arrested for writing letters like this?”
Big Jim looked across to me and I to him, and I knew he was wondering, What on earth? Of course Big Jim didn’t know that on the way to school Poetry and I had found the letter that somebody had shoved into my dad’s mailbox.
Anyway, there was a tangled-up expression on all our faces until suddenly Mr. Black said fiercely, as if he was trying to catch us in a trap, “You boys can either confess, or every one of you will take a switching within the next eight minutes—one minute for each of you!”
His jaw was set grimly. Then he reached up to the top of the maps, took down two switches, laid one of them on the desk, and stepped out to the edge of the platform. The other switch was in one hand and the letter in the other.
Then he looked at us all again. This time he changed his voice and said almost kindly, “I’ll give you all one more chance, boys. Anybody want to confess?”
Not a one of us said anything, so he looked across at me and said, “How about you, William Collins? Ever see this before?”
I had my hand in my pocket on the letter I had there, so I said, “No sir, I never did. Anyway I don’t think so. I mean—”
And I knew that if I’d been Mr. Black and a boy had said that to me, I’d have thought he was lying.
“Fine,” Mr. Black said. “Anybody else want to confess? How about you, Leslie? Have you ever seen this?”
Poetry looked at me, and since he didn’t know but what it might have been the same letter he had found that morning and that maybe I had given it to Mr. Black, he said, “I-I don’t know. I don’t think so … maybe I have.”
“Anybody else? How about you?” He looked at Circus, and Circus looked right straight in front of him and said, “I never saw it before.”
“And you, William?” He looked at Shorty Long, and Shorty Long looked at me out of the corner of his eye and said, “Yes sir, Mr. Black. I have.”
“Would you mind telling us where you saw it, William?”
Shorty Long looked at me again and then at Mr. Black and said, “I saw it in Bill Collins’s hand.”
Like a flash, Mr. Black turned to me and said, “Will you stand up, young man, and tell us all you know about this—this dastardly bit of cowardice—this cheap way of doing things?”
I sat still in my seat.
“Stand up!” he ordered again, and I could see his face was white with anger.
I stood up.
“Tell us all you know about this letter.”
“I don’t know anything about it,” I said. “I never saw it before.”
“You did too,” Shorty Long said. “You showed it to me yourself.”
“I did not,” I said.
I wasn’t getting along very well with the plan I’
d had in my mind to forgive Shorty Long and be kind to him and everything. Right that minute I was mad at him again and wanted to sock him on the jaw or somewhere. And I could tell by the way I felt that it would take me quite a long time to get over being angry. I’d have to watch my temper pretty close, or I’d say something fierce to him.
I had my hand in my pocket, holding on tight to the letter there, trying to decide what to do with it. Maybe I ought to pull it out and walk right up to Mr. Black and say, “I don’t know what’s in the letter you have in your hand, but here is one somebody wrote to me.” But I felt kind of the way I do in a dream sometimes when a bear is after me and I want to run and can’t. I just stood there and looked at Mr. Black and at the letter in his hand.
I guess maybe he had made up his mind to ask each one of us the same question, for right that second he looked at Dragonfly and said, “And you, Roy, do you know anything about this letter?”
And Dragonfly’s eyes started to blink as though he was going to be allergic to even the question Mr. Black had asked, but he quickly grabbed his nose, and only a very small part of his sneeze came out. It must have hurt his sty though, because right on the tail end of his sneeze he said, “Ouch!” just as he had when we were sitting on the stairway at Poetry’s house and Mr. Black had seen him and frowned at him.
Dragonfly started blinking again, and I knew another sneeze was getting ready to happen. But he stopped all of it this time and said, “No sir,” to Mr. Black.
Little Jim was next.
“All right, James,” Mr. Black said to Little Jim. “Of course, you don’t know anything about this letter?”
And that little guy not only surprised all of us, but he startled us plenty when he said, “My mother has envelopes that color and just that size. I can tell you if it’s her handwriting if you’ll let me see it.”
Of course it didn’t even make sense that Little Jim’s mom had written such a letter as Mr. Black acted like was written in that envelope.
There was only one of us left, and that was Little Tom Till. All of us looked to where he sat next to the window right behind the big dictionary, which lies on a shelf fastened to the wall.
“All right, Thomas, you’re the only one left who didn’t do it,” Mr. Black said. The very way he said it sounded as though he thought the whole gang of us were telling lies but were acting innocent.
Little Tom sat there looking down at his hands and twisting the handkerchief that was in one of them. Tom didn’t answer, so Mr. Black asked him straight out, “Thomas, did you write this?”
Little Tom Till sniffled as though he was going to cry or was already crying. Then he swallowed and all of a sudden spoke up, saying, “No sir, I didn’t!”
Right that second Big Jim’s hand was waving in the air again, so Mr. Black nodded to him and said, “All right, James!”
Big Jim slid out of his seat, stood up, and in a very gentlemanlike voice, which he nearly always used anyway when he was talking to an older person, said politely, “Mr. Black, I wonder if you will let us see the letter or else read it to us. Most of us don’t know anything about it, and we would like to know what it’s all about.”
Well, when Big Jim used such a kind voice, I remembered one of the Bible verses my dad had made me learn once, “A gentle answer turns away wrath.” It means that if anybody is mad at you, you can sometimes keep him from hurting you and can even make his anger melt away like a piece of ice on a hot stove if you will just use a kind voice to him.
Mr. Black looked out over the schoolroom at all of us, and then, maybe without intending to, he used the same kind of kind voice that Big Jim had used. He said: “How many of you boys have never seen this letter? Raise your hands, please.”
Well, I raised my freckled hand, Dragonfly raised his awkward, little-bit-dirty one, Circus raised his very brown one, Big Jim raised his big one, Little Jim raised his small hand, which he always kept very clean because his mom made him wash his hands a lot since he practiced the piano every day. Only Shorty Long and Little Tom and Poetry didn’t have their hands up.
Well, I knew that Poetry hadn’t seen it but only thought he had. Of course, I didn’t know whether Shorty Long had seen it or not, because I still wondered if maybe his dad had been the one who had written the one I had in my pocket. If he wrote the one I had in my pocket, maybe he also wrote the one that was in Mr. Black’s hand.
I was surprised at Little Tom, though, but maybe he didn’t understand the question.
“All right,” Mr. Black said all of a sudden. He whirled around and walked up to the platform where he could look out over the schoolroom at all of us and see all of us at the same time without having to move his head in different directions. “I’ll read it to you.”
I quickly grabbed a piece of paper and a pencil and was going to try to write it down while he read it.
When he spied me doing that, it must have given him a bright idea, for he said to all of us, “I’ll not only read it to you, boys, but I’m going to ask each one of you to take it down just as I give it to you. I’ll soon find out which one of you wrote it!”
And that’s how the mystery began to get even worse than it had been. Things began to make a little sense as I wrote, though, following along behind Mr. Black’s very gruff voice. The letter must have made him angry while he was reading it to us, because the farther he read, the more gruff his voice became. In fact it sounded terribly angry. The letter started out: “Dear Hoosier Schoolmaster.”
He didn’t read very fast because of waiting for the slowest ones of us to follow him, so I had a moment’s time for my mind to go hop-skip-and-jump over toward Poetry. I was remembering the book he had in his library, which we had been reading last night about the Hoosier schoolmaster who had a gang of rough boys in his school. Of course, I knew that Poetry had not written any such crazy letter.
Mr. Black’s voice went on, and I began to write what he read:
You are not going to get anywhere by stirring up trouble in the Sugar Creek Gang. You are a roughneck and to blame for all the trouble we had yesterday …
While I was writing that, I happened to think that whoever had written the note must have written it some time after school yesterday, because no one could have written anything about the day before it was over. The next thing Mr. Black read for us to write was:
If you expect to get along with the boys of the Sugar Creek Gang, you will have to apologize for what you did yesterday …
Whew! I thought. Whoever wrote that certainly had a lot of nerve.
We kept on writing, and this is what came next—and was even worse than what I’d already written:
We are not used to having a baldheaded schoolteacher boss us around. If you want to apologize like a gentleman, meet us at the Sugar Creek bridge on the North Road between six and seven o’clock tonight. If you don’t, there will be more trouble tomorrow.
T H E
GANG
P. S. If you get there before we do, wait till we come.
Just as soon as we had finished what he’d read to us, Mr. Black made us all come to the platform and lay our papers down side by side on the wide top of his big rectangular desk. Then he made us stand all around his desk beside and behind him and look at the different handwriting to see which one was like the one he had in his hand.
There wasn’t one that was like it. But it was exactly like the handwriting on the letter in my pocket. It was the same kind of stationery too, just an ordinary kind you buy in any store, having blue lines on it for your pencil or pen to follow.
I still had my letter in my pocket and was wondering if I ought to show it to Mr. Black, when Big Jim spoke very politely again, although his voice was trembling; “Where did you find this, Mr. Black?”
I was proud of Big Jim, and I remembered that under the bridge last night he had said it would be up to us to prove to Mr. Black we were not roughnecks.
Mr. Black answered as respectfully as Big Jim had asked the question. “It was tuck
ed under the pommel coat-strap on my saddle, when I went out to take a ride.”
Then Big Jim said, “Of course, you know now that none of the Sugar Creek Gang wrote it.”
All of a sudden I pulled the other note out of my pocket and tossed it down on the desk and said, “And here is another note somebody wrote.”
We all stood there while Mr. Black opened the envelope and read the insulting words, which were written in the same handwriting as that in the letter he had found on his saddle. While he was reading, a strange expression came over his face. I noticed his eyes take on a faraway look, while he lifted his head and stared toward the window as if he wasn’t seeing anything. He didn’t even look at us when he said, “You may take your seats, boys,” which we did.
He walked around in front of his desk, looked down at us, and said, “It’s past time for school to begin. Ring the bell, Leslie,” which Poetry started to do right away.
“Wait,” Mr. Black said to him, and Poetry waited. He had already reached the door, had the bell rope in his hand, and was just ready to give it a long hard pull.
“Boys,” Mr. Black said, “I think you and I had a bad start yesterday. I don’t know who is responsible, but I am going to ask that we begin all over again, not only as teacher and pupils but as friends. Evidently someone is trying to stir up trouble for us all. Let’s keep our eyes open during the next few days to see if we can find out who is doing it.”
Poetry still had the bell rope in his hand, and everything was very quiet in the room for a minute while Mr. Black just stood there and looked at us. In one hand he had the two letters and in the other the switches he had taken down a little while before. Then he moved back to the maps, put both switches on the ledge above them, turned back to us, and said, “I have a notion we are not going to need those switches. All right, Leslie—”
And right away I heard the squeaking of the wheel in the belfry and the clanging of the big school bell. Then I felt the shaking of the windows of the schoolhouse as the bell was ringing. Right away there were a lot of steps on the porch, the door opened, a flock of noisy girls came in, and school started.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 7-12 Page 31