The fingers of both of Mr. Black’s hands were drumming on the desk on each side of his open Bible now, and he had his eyes glued to the page, although I could tell the way he was staring at the page that he maybe wasn’t reading but only thinking.
It was as quiet, ten times as quiet, as if we were having school.
And then Mr. Black cleared his throat and said, “It’s been a very exciting afternoon, boys, and I don’t feel any too well. I think I ran too hard to catch Prince.”
He took a very deep breath and sighed and yawned and leaned back in his chair, without looking straight at us but just in our direction. Little Jim said, “Did you catch him? Was he hurt?”
“Circus stopped him,” Mr. Black said, “and we put him up in their barn till he calms down and quits trembling. You boys want to bring in a couple of armloads of wood?”
Well, right away all of us boys were carrying in wood and stacking it in the back of the schoolroom, where we would have plenty to keep the schoolhouse nice and warm tomorrow.
I just couldn’t figure it out—our not getting any switching and Mr. Black reading the Bible and all of a sudden acting very kind. Why, when we carried in our loads of wood, he acted as if he was our very best friend and that we not only hadn’t done anything wrong but that he didn’t even think we had. I couldn’t understand it.
But all the time Little Jim had a happy grin on his face while we worked, and he kept saying, “I thought it would work. I was pretty sure it would, and it did.”
“What worked?” I said to him, just as he opened the door for me and I went in with an armload. He shut the door after me. Dragonfly and Poetry were out in the woodshed getting another load.
“Oh, something,” Little Jim said and wouldn’t tell me, but he certainly had a cheerful expression on his face.
Pretty soon, when we were all done and were getting ready to go home, Mr. Black stopped us and said, “Wait a minute, boys. I need one more picture. You know, next Wednesday night Mrs. Mansfield is going to give a book review of The Hoosier Schoolmaster at the Literary Society, and I’ve promised to illustrate the story on the screen with some modern pictures from real life. I ought to have one of a teacher putting a board on the chimney of a schoolhouse. Leslie, you get that ladder I saw you boys carry behind the schoolhouse a while ago and set it up again—here, Bill, hold my Bible a minute.”
He thrust the beautiful new brown-bound Bible into my hands and started around the schoolhouse with Poetry to where we’d buried the ladder.
What on earth! I thought and decided he must have looked toward the schoolhouse once and seen us putting it there, while he was down the road between the school and Circus’s house.
Hardly knowing I was going to, I opened the Bible to the first blank page, and what I saw was “To my dear son, Sam Black, from Mother.” And right below it were printed, very carefully, the words:
This Book will keep you from sin,
or
Sin will keep you from this Book.
Soon the ladder was set up, and, with Little Jim and me holding it, Mr. Black was on his way up. Poetry, who knew how to take pictures better than any of the rest of us, was standing out from the schoolhouse, and he snapped the picture.
While Mr. Black was still up on the roof, he called down to all of us in a cheerful voice, “That was a very clever poem you boys composed—you know, the one you had on the snowman yesterday and on the blackboard this afternoon. I think I got a very good picture of both of them for next Wednesday night. The people of Sugar Creek will think it very clever. When I first got the idea of illustrating the book review for Mrs. Mansfield, I didn’t know how much cooperation you boys were going to give me.”
Things still didn’t make sense. I couldn’t understand it.
On the way home though, as Poetry and I carried Dad’s new light ladder and Little Jim carried our swing board, all of a sudden Dragonfly let out a yell and made a dive for something shining in the road. He swooped down on it and picked it up and exclaimed, “Good luck! No wonder we had good luck! Here’s a brand-new horseshoe! No wonder we didn’t get a licking from Mr. Black.”
And it was a horseshoe! I knew it must have come off Prince when he was running down this very same road about an hour ago with half a gate swinging on his bridle rein.
Dragonfly hung the new horseshoe on his arm and said excitedly, “Will my mother ever be tickled! She’ll hang it above our kitchen door. We’ve got three there now that I found last year, and this is my first one this year. Boy oh boy, it’s going to be a lucky year for the Sugar Creek Gang!”
Little Jim, who had been shuffling along ahead of the rest of us with the swing board under one arm and with his stick in his other hand, stopped all of a sudden and looked back over our heads toward where the sun had just gone behind a cloud in the southwest. He had a faraway expression in his eyes. He didn’t pay any attention to what Dragonfly had said but dropped back beside me and said, “That certainly was a swell sermon this morning. I knew maybe Sylvia’s dad was going to preach about that, and sure enough he did.”
“About what?” I asked him. Little Jim was the only one of the gang that it was easy to talk with about sermons, except maybe Poetry.
Little Jim socked at a brown mullein stalk with his stick and scattered brown seeds in different directions, then he answered me with his back still turned, “Oh, about when you get Jesus in your heart, you don’t get mad so easy. And when you do, you behave yourself anyway—just like a fire in a house melts the snow off the roof. Or like when spring comes, the new leaves will push all of the old dead leaves off that have hung on all winter.”
Just that minute, Poetry, who had the other end of the ladder, yelled back to me, “Quit walking so jerkily, Bill Collins!”
Then I remembered that our teacher had been in church that morning, and of course he had heard the part of the sermon I hadn’t heard, because I had been thinking about Poetry’s pet lamb and Snow-White, our white pigeon.
Little Jim said, “When I put that question in ‘The Minister’s Question Box’ just inside the church door this morning, I hoped Sylvia’s dad would answer it in his very first sermon, and he did.”
So that was it!
Dragonfly spoke up then. “Was that what you were thinking about yesterday afternoon when you were looking up in the beech tree at the bottom of Bumblebee Hill, and when you kept talking about snow on people’s houses?” And that was the first time I even guessed that that little spindle-legged guy knew what we were talking about.
“Sure,” Little Jim said.
Dragonfly tossed his new horseshoe up in the air and caught it when it came down. He said, “It’s a pretty horseshoe, anyway. Besides, I bet the gang does have a lucky year, don’t you?”
Little Jim whispered to me something that was a real secret, and it made me like him awful well to know he wasn’t afraid to talk to me about it. He said, “Do you suppose Mr. Black really became a Christian this morning while Sylvia’s dad was preaching—or maybe he is just going to let Jesus into his heart real soon?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
Poetry, who didn’t know what we were all talking about because he was up at the other end of the kind of long ladder, said back to us, “We shouldn’t have carried this ladder home. We should have made Shorty Long and Bob Till do it. They took it there in the first place!”
And Little Jim piped up, saying, “Are you sure? Maybe Mr. Black did it so he could get a picture of it for next Wednesday night.”
Dragonfly heard that and said, “But who piled the chairs up on his desk and knocked the Christmas tree over and everything?”
“Yeah, that’s right,” Little Jim said. “I guess maybe they did do it, but I’m not very mad at ’em.”
“I’m not either,” I said, “not very much anyway.” And I wasn’t. But I knew that as long as they lived in the neighborhood we could expect most anything to happen.
Then Little Jim said to all of us, “As soon as the new co
ld wave is over, I’ll bet it’ll start to get warm. And pretty soon spring’ll be here, and all the beech switches all along Sugar Creek will have new green leaves on ’em.”
Then he whisked on ahead of us, every now and then stopping to make rabbit tracks in the snow with his pretty striped ash stick.
Boy oh boy, I wished it was already spring, because when spring came we could all go barefoot again. And as soon as Sugar Creek’s face was thawed out, we’d go swimming in the old swimming hole and maybe have some very exciting brand-new adventures, the way we always do every spring and summer. But the first thing I wanted to do when spring came was to go fishing.
I was thinking of what fun it’d be when spring came when all of a sudden I heard a roaring sound coming from the direction of Dragonfly’s dad’s woods, like a terrible wind beginning to blow through the bare trees. I looked up quick and noticed that the sky in that direction was darkish-looking, kind of brown, as if there was a lot of dust blowing in from some faraway prairie. Then I felt a gust of cold wind hit me hard in the face.
Almost right away we were in a whirling snowstorm, and I knew the new cold wave had already come—and that before spring got to Sugar Creek, we’d have a lot more winter. In fact, there might even be a blizzard.
“Hurry up!” all of us yelled. “We’ve got to get home quick.”
But that’s the beginning of another Sugar Creek Gang story, which I hope I’ll get a chance to write for you real soon.
Paul Hutchens
MOODY PUBLISHERS
CHICAGO
©1947, 1997 by
PAULINE HUTCHENS WILSON
Revised Edition, 1997
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
All Scripture quotations are taken from the New American Standard Bible, © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, and 1994 by The Lockman Foundation, and are used by permission.
Original Title: Sugar Creek Gang Goes North
ISBN: 978-0-8024-7016-4
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PREFACE
Hi—from a member of the Sugar Creek
It’s just that I don’t know which one I am. When I was good, I was Little Jim. When I did bad things—well, sometimes I was Bill Collins or even mischievous Poetry.
You see, I am the daughter of Paul Hutchens, and I spent many an hour listening to him read his manuscript as far as he had written it that particular day. I went along to the north woods of Minnesota, to Colorado, and to the various other places he would go to find something different for the Gang to do.
Now the years have passed—more than fifty, actually. My father is in heaven, but the Gang goes on. All thirty-six books are still in print and now are being updated for today’s readers with input from my five children, who also span the decades from the ’50s to the ’70s.
The real Sugar Creek is in Indiana, and my father and his six brothers were the original Gang. But the idea of the books and their ministry were and are the Lord’s. It is He who keeps the Gang going.
PAULINE HUTCHENS WILSON
1
I guess I never did get tired thinking about all the interesting and exciting things that happened to the Sugar Creek Gang when we went camping far up in the North. One of the happiest memories was of the time when Poetry, the barrel-shaped member of our gang, and I were lost out in the forest. While we were trying to get unlost we met a brown-faced Indian boy, whose name was Snow-in-the-Face, and his big brother, whose name was Eagle Eye.
Little Snow-in-the-Face was the cutest little Indian boy I had ever seen. In fact, he was the first one I’d ever seen up close. I kept thinking about him and wishing that the whole Sugar Creek Gang could go again up into that wonderful country that everybody calls the Paul Bunyan Playground and see how Snow-in-the-Face was getting along and how his big brother’s Indian Sunday school was growing, which, as you know, they were having every Sunday in an old railroad coach they had taken into the forest and fixed up as a church.
I never had any idea that we would get to go back the very next summer. But here I am, telling you about how we happened to get to go, and how quick we started, and all the exciting things that happened on the way and after we got there—especially after we got there. Boy, oh, boy! It was fun—especially that night when we ran ker-smack into a kidnapper mystery, and some of us who were mixed up in it were scared almost half to death.
Imagine a very dark night with only enough moonlight to make things look spooky, and strange screaming sounds echoing through the forest and over the lake, and then finding a kidnapped girl all wrapped in an Indian blanket with a handkerchief stuffed into her mouth and—but that’s getting ahead of the story, and I’d better not tell you how that happened until I get to it, because it might spoil the story for you. And I hope you won’t start turning the pages of this book real fast and read the mystery first, because that wouldn’t be fair.
Anyway, this is how we got to go.
Some of us from the Sugar Creek Gang were lying in the long mashed-down grass in a level place not far from where the hill goes down real steep to the spring at the bottom, where my dad is always sending me to get a pail of cold fresh water for us to drink at our house. We were all lying in different directions, talking and laughing and yawning and pretending to be sleepy. Some of us were tumbling around a little and making a nuisance of ourselves to each other. Most of us had long stems of blue-grass in our mouths and were chewing on the ends, and all of us were feeling great. I had my binoculars up to my eyes looking around at different things.
First I watched a red squirrel high up in a big sugar tree, lying flat and lazy on the top of a gray branch as though he was taking a two-o’clock-in-the-afternoon sunbath, which was what time of day it was that Saturday. I had been lying on my back looking up at the squirrel.
Then I rolled over and got onto my knees and focused the binoculars on Sugar Creek. Sugar Creek’s face was lazy here, because it was a wide part of the creek, and the water moved very slowly, hardly moving, and was as quiet as Pass Lake had been up in Minnesota in the Paul Bunyan country on a very quiet day. There were little whitish patches of different-shaped specks of foam floating along on the brownish-blue water.
While I was looking at Sugar Creek with its wide, quiet face and dreaming about a big blue-water lake up North, I saw some V-shaped waves coming out across the creek from the opposite shore. The pointed end of the V was coming straight toward the spring and bringing the rest of the V along with it. I knew right away it was a muskrat swimming toward our side of the creek.
As I looked at the brownish muskrat through my binoculars, it seemed very close. I could see its pretty chestnut-brown fur. Its head was broad and sort of blunt, and I knew if I could have seen its tail it would have been about half as long as the muskrat, deeper than it was wide, and that it would have scales on it and only a few scattered hairs. I quickly grabbed a big rock and threw it as straight and hard as I could right toward the acute angle of the long moving V, which was still coming across the creek toward us.
And would you believe this? I’m not always such a good shot with a rock, but this time that rock went straight toward where the muskrat was headed. And by the time the rock and the muskrat got to the same place, the rock went kerswishety-splash right on the broad blunt head of the musquash, which is another and kind of fancy name for a muskrat.
Circus, the acrobat
in our gang, was the only one who saw me do what I had done. He yelled out to me in a voice that sounded like a circus barker’s voice, “Atta boy, Bill! Boy, oh, boy, that was a great shot! I couldn’t have done any better myself!”
“Better than what?” nearly all the rest of the gang woke up and asked him at the same time.
“Bill killed an Ondatra zibethica,” Circus said, which is the Latin name for a muskrat. Circus’s dad is a trapper, and Circus has a good animal book in his library. “Socked it in the head with a rock.”
Everybody looked out toward Sugar Creek to the place where the rock had socked the Ondatra and where the two forks of the V were getting wider and wider, almost disappearing into nothing, the way waves do when they get old enough.
“Look at those waves!” Poetry said, meaning the new waves my big rock had started. There was a widening circle going out from where it had struck.
“Reminds me of the waves on Pass Lake where we spent our vacation last summer,” Poetry said. “Remember the ones we had a tilt-a-whirl ride on when Eagle Eye’s boat upset and we got separated from it? If we hadn’t had our life vests on we’d have been drowned because it was too far from the shore to swim!”
“Sure,” Dragonfly piped up, “and that’s the reason why every boy in the world who is in a boat on a lake or river ought to wear a life vest, or else there ought to be plenty of life preservers in the boat, just in case.”
“Hey!” Little Jim piped up, squeaking in his mouselike voice. “Your On-onda-something-or-other has come to life away down the creek!”
And sure enough it had. Way down the creek, maybe fifty feet farther, there was another V moving along toward the Sugar Creek bridge, which meant I hadn’t killed the musquash at all but only scared it. Maybe my rock hadn’t even hit it, and it had ducked and swum under water the way Ondatra zibethicas do in Sugar Creek and as loons do in Pass Lake in northern Minnesota.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 7-12 Page 41