“I’m thirsty,” Circus said. He jumped up from where he had been lying on his back with his feet propped up on a big hollow stump. That hollow stump was the same one his dad had slipped down inside once and had gotten bit by a black widow spider that had had her web inside.
Right away we were all scurrying down the steep hill to the spring and getting a drink of water apiece, either stooping down and drinking like cows or else using the paper cups that we kept in a little container we had put on the tree that leaned over the spring—in place of the old tin cup that we’d battered into a flat piece of tin and thrown into Sugar Creek.
All of a sudden, we heard a strange noise up at the top of the hill that sounded like somebody moving along through last year’s dead leaves and at the same time talking or mumbling to himself about something.
“Sh!” Dragonfly said, shushing us, he being the one who nearly always heard or saw something before any of the rest of us did.
We all hushed, and then I heard a man’s voice talking to himself or something up there at the top of the hill.
“Sh!” I said, and we all stopped whatever we had been doing and didn’t move, all except Little Jim. He lost his balance and, to keep from falling the wrong direction—which was into a puddle of cold clean water on the other side of the spring—he had to step awkwardly in several places, jumping from one rock to another and using his pretty stick-candy-looking stick to help him.
We kept hushed for a minute, and the sound up at the top of the hill kept right on—leaves rasping and rustling and a man’s voice mumbling something as though he was talking to himself.
All of us had our eyes on Big Jim, our leader. I was looking at his fuzzy mustache, which was like the down on a baby pigeon, wondering who was up on the hilltop, thinking about how I wished I could get a little fuzz on my upper lip, and wondering if I could make mine grow if I used some kind of cream on it or something, the way girls do when they want to look older than they are.
Big Jim looked around at the irregular circle of us and nodded to me, motioning with his thumb for me to follow him. He stopped all the rest of the gang from following. And the next minute I was creeping quietly up that steep incline behind Big Jim.
Little Jim also came along, because right at the last second Big Jim motioned to him that he could, as he had a hurt look in his eyes as if maybe nobody thought he was important because he was so little.
I had a trembling feeling inside of me. I just knew there was going to be a surprise at the top of that hill and maybe a mystery. Also, I felt proud that Big Jim had picked me out to go up with him, because he nearly always picks Circus, who is next biggest in the gang.
I didn’t need to feel proud, though, because when I heard a little slithering noise behind me, I knew why Circus didn’t get invited—he was halfway up a small sapling that grew near the spring. He was already almost high enough to see what was going on at the top of the hill. Circus was doing what he was always doing anyway, climbing trees most any time or all the time, looking like a monkey even when he wasn’t up a tree. The only thing that kept him from hanging by his tail like a monkey was that he didn’t have any tail, but he could hang by his legs anyway.
When we had almost reached the top, I felt Little Jim’s small hand take hold of my arm tight, as if he was scared, because we could still hear somebody walking around and talking to himself.
Big Jim stopped us, and we all very slowly half crawled the rest of the way up. My heart was pounding like everything. I just knew there was going to be excitement at the top. And when you know there is going to be excitement, you can’t wait for it but get excited right away.
“Listen!” Little Jim whispered to me. “He’s pounding something.”
“Sh!” Big Jim said to us, frowning fiercely, and we kept still.
What’s going on up there? I wondered and wished I was a little farther up, but Big Jim had stopped us again so we could listen.
One, two, three—pound, pound, pound. There were nine or ten whacks with something on something, and then the pounding stopped, and we heard footsteps going away.
I looked back down the hill at the rest of the gang. Dragonfly’s eyes were large and round, as they are when he is half scared or excited. Poetry had a scowl on his broad face,
since he was the one who had a detectivelike mind and was maybe disappointed that Big Jim had made him stay at the bottom of the hill. Little red-haired Tom Till’s freckled face looked very strange. He was stooped over, trying to pry a root loose out of the ground so that he’d be ready to throw it at somebody or something if he got a chance or if he had to. His face looked as if he was ready for some kind of fight and that he half hoped there might be one.
And if I had been down there at the bottom of the incline at the spring and somebody else had been looking down at me, he would have seen another red-haired, freckled-faced boy, whose hair was trying to stand up on end under his old straw hat and who wasn’t much to look at but who had a fiery temper, which had to be watched all the time or it would explode on somebody or something.
Maybe, in case you’ve never read anything about the Sugar Creek Gang before, I’d better tell you that I am red-haired and freckled-faced and do have a fiery temper some of the time—and that my name is Bill Collins. I have a great mom and dad and a little baby sister, whose name is Charlotte Ann, and I’m the only boy in the Collins family.
I whirled around quickly from looking down the hill at the rest of the gang and from seeing Circus, who was up the elm sapling trying to see over the crest of the hill but probably couldn’t. Big Jim had his finger up to his lips for all of us to keep still, which we did.
The pounding had stopped, and we could hear footsteps moving along in the woods, getting fainter and fainter.
Then Big Jim said to us, “He can’t hear us now. His shoes are making so much noise in the leaves.”
We hurried to the top and looked, and Little Jim whispered, “It’s somebody wearing old overalls,” which it was, and he was disappearing around the corner of the path that led from the spring down the creek, going toward the old sycamore tree and the swamp.
Big Jim gave us the signal, and all of us broke out of our very painful silence and were acting like ourselves again but wondering who on earth had been there and what he had been doing and why.
All of a sudden, Dragonfly, who had been looking around for shoe tracks with Poetry, let out a yell and said, “Hey, gang, come here! Here’s a letter nailed onto the old Black Widow Stump!” which was the name we’d given the stump after Circus’s dad had been bitten there.
We all made a rush to where Dragonfly’s dragonflylike eyes were studying something on the stump, and then I was reading the envelope, which said, in very awkward old handwriting:
URGENT
To the Sugar Creek Gang
(Personal. Please open at once.)
2
I just stood there with all the rest of the members of the Sugar Creek Gang, staring at the envelope and the crazy old handwriting on it that said, “Personal. Please open at once.”
Big Jim, the leader of our gang, reached out and tore the envelope off the nail that had been driven through the corner where the stamp would have been if there had been one. He handed it to me. “Read it out loud to all of us,” he said.
I couldn’t imagine what was on the inside. I didn’t recognize the writing and couldn’t even guess who had written it.
“Stand back, everybody,” Big Jim ordered, “and let him have plenty of room.”
“Yeah, let him have plenty of room. It might explode,” Dragonfly said.
I tore open the envelope in a hurry, and this is what I read:
Members of the Sugar Creek Gang—Big Jim, Little Jim, Poetry, Circus, Dragonfly, Bill Collins, and Tom Till—as soon as you can after reading this, make a beeline for Bumblebee Hill, climb through the barbed-wire fence at the top, and stop at the tombstone of Sarah Paddler in the old abandoned cemetery. There you will find another let
ter giving you instructions what to do next. It is VERY IMPORTANT.
G U E S S
WHO
I read the letter out loud in a sort of trembling voice because I was a little scared. Then I looked around at different ones to see what they were thinking, but couldn’t tell.
“What’ll we do?” Little Jim piped up.
Little Tom Till swallowed hard as if he had taken too big a bite of something and was trying to swallow it. Then he sort of stuttered, “M-maybe a ghost wrote it.”
I looked quickly at Dragonfly since he believes there is such a thing as a ghost, because his mother thinks there is, and right away he had a funny expression on his face. His dragonflylike eyes looked even larger than they were. “My mother told me to stay out of that cemetery,” he said.
“Aw, fraidy-cat,” Poetry said, “there isn’t any such thing as a ghost. Besides, ghosts can’t write.”
“Oh, yes, they can,” Dragonfly said. “I saw it in the newspaper once that a senator or somebody’s speech was written by a ghostwriter and—”
“That’s crazy!” Poetry said. “A ghostwriter is a person nobody knows, who writes something for somebody else, and nobody knows it. But it’s a real person and not a ghost.”
Poetry read an awful lot of the many books his dad and mom were always buying for him, and he was as smart as anything.
Tom Till spoke up then and said, “A ghost wouldn’t know that Bumblebee Hill had its name changed from Strawberry Hill to Bumblebee Hill, would it?”
And right away I was remembering that hill where the gang had had a fierce fight with a town gang, when Little Tom had still belonged to that other gang. We had all stirred up a bumblebees’ nest and had gotten stung in different places, which had hurt worse than each other’s fists had, and the fight had broken up. We’d given that hill a new name.
In that fight, as you may know, two red-haired boys had had a terrible battle. One of the red-haired, freckled-faced boys had licked the other one all to smithereens for a while—until I started fighting a little harder, and then I’d licked him even worse, all in the same fight.
Big Jim said, “A ghost probably couldn’t spell our names. Anyway, let’s get going to the old cemetery and see what happens.”
With that, Circus was already on his way, running like a deer. All of us were right at his heels, running as fast as we could go.
Talking about spelling must have reminded Poetry of a poem. As you know, he was always learning new poems by heart and quoting them to us. He knew maybe a hundred of them, and you never knew when he was going to start one at the wrong time. He hardly ever got to finish one, though, because of the gang’s stopping him or else it was too long to finish before we all thought of something we’d rather do than listen to his poem.
Anyway, while he and I were puffing along with the rest of the gang toward Bumblebee Hill, he started puffing out a new one I’d never heard before, and this is the way it went:
“The teacher has no E Z time
To teach his A B C’s:
It per C V rance takes sublime,
And all his N R G’s.
In K C doesn’t use the birch
All kindness does S A,
The scholars who X L at church,
In school will 1/2 to pay …”
“Don’t use the word birch,” I panted to Poetry, and he panted back at me, “Why?”
“Because it reminds me of beech, and beech reminds me of a beech switch, which reminds me of a schoolteacher, and that reminds me of school, and—”
Poetry cut in on my sentence and said, “Birch reminds me of a birch tree away up North where we were on our camping trip once, and where I’d like to go again this year. In fact, it’s getting so hot that I don’t see how we can stand not going up there again.”
I looked out of the corner of my right eye at him as we dashed along behind and beside and in front of the gang toward Bumblebee Hill. I said, “I don’t see why we have to stay where it is so hot all summer.”
That started him off on his poem again, and he got another whole verse in before we reached the bottom of Bumblebee Hill and had to save most of our wind for climbing and not much for talking. This is the next verse, which he puffed out to me. The poem was still talking about a schoolteacher and went:
“They can’t C Y he makes them learn
L S N and his rules.
They C K chance to overturn,
Preferring 2 B fools.”
I found out later how to spell out the poem, when he showed it to me in his mother’s old scrapbook. It was a clever poem, I thought.
Puff, puff, puff, up the hill we went, and at the cemetery we stopped. It was a real spooky place, all overgrown with weeds and choke-cherry and blue vervain and mullein stalks. The blue vervain was one of the prettiest wild-flowers in all Sugar Creek territory, but all the farmers called it a weed, and maybe it was. But up real close and under a magnifying glass, its flowers are very pretty.
Just as I was climbing through the fence beside Little Jim, holding two strands of barbed wire high enough apart for him to slither through and not get his nice new blue shirt caught, Little Jim, who is a sort of a dreamer and is always imagining what something or other looks like, said to me, “They look like upside-down candelabra, don’t they?” Little Jim knew I liked flowers myself, because my mom liked them so well and always wanted me to pick some and set them in vases in different parts of our house.
“What looks like what?” Dragonfly said and sneezed, and I knew right away that he was allergic to something in the cemetery, as he was allergic to nearly everything in Sugar Creek in the summertime. And when people are allergic to things like that, they nearly always sneeze a lot.
Little Jim finished getting through without getting his shirt caught and said, “The flower spikes which branch off from the stem of the vervain look like upside-down candelabra.”
I remembered that his mother, besides being the best pianist in all Sugar Creek territory, was maybe the prettiest mom of all the Sugar Creek Gang’s moms. She also had all kinds of flowers in a special garden at their home, and she talked about flowers so much that Little Jim probably knew all the different kinds of words that people use when they talk about flowers.
Little Jim broke off a stalk of vervain, and I noticed that there was a purplish ring of small flowers at the very bottom of every one of the slender flower spikes, which is the way vervain do their flowering. They begin with a little purple ring at the bottom of the spike about the first of July, and the flowers keep on blooming all summer. The ring creeps up higher and higher until school starts about the first of September. Pretty soon the flowers get clear to the top, and then, like blue rings slipping off the ends of green fingers, they are all gone.
Well, soon there we all were, standing around in a sort of half circle, looking over each other’s shoulders and between each other’s heads, right in front of Old Man Paddler’s dead wife’s tall tombstone. Her name had been Sarah Paddler, and she had died a long time ago.
There were a couple of other tombstones there, too, for the old man’s two boys. They had died about the same time many years ago, and now that kind old man, whom the Sugar Creek Gang loved so well, had maybe been using all the love that he’d had left over when his own boys died and was pouring it out on us live boys, instead of wasting it on a dog or a lot of other things.
Carved or chiseled on the tombstone was the figure of a hand with the forefinger pointing up toward the sky, and right below the hand were the words:
There Is Rest in Heaven.
Standing on a little ledge, and fastened onto the tombstone with tape, was an envelope like the one we had just found and had read down at the Black Widow Stump, and on it said:
URGENT
To the Sugar Creek Gang
(Personal. Open at once.)
This time Big Jim took the envelope and handed it to Little Jim, who read it in his squeaky voice to all of us, and this is what it said:
T
he Sugar Creek Gang is on the right track;
Now turn right around and hurry right back—
Go straight to the old hollow sycamore tree,
And there, if you look, you will see what you see.
This time it wasn’t signed “Guess Who,” but the poetry sounded like Poetry’s poetry, and I looked at him. He was busy studying the ground, though, to see if he could find any shoe tracks.
“Last one to the sycamore tree is a cow’s tail,” Circus said and was ready to make a dive for the cemetery fence.
Dragonfly got a funny look on his face, as if he was going to sneeze but wasn’t quite sure whether he was or not. He looked toward the sun, which hurt his eyes a little, and that maybe made tears, which, with his face raised like that, tickled his nose on the inside. Anyway, he let out one of his favorite sneezes, which was half blocked like a football kick but went off to one side. Then he sneezed again three times fast, as if he couldn’t help it, and said, “I’m allergic to something in this old graveyard. I’m allergic to ghosts.”
Right away we were all dashing toward the barbed-wire fence, and all of us got through without tearing our clothes and went zippety-zip-zip, dash, swerve, swish-swish-swish toward the spring again. Then it was down the path that led along the top of the hill toward Sugar Creek bridge. And across the old north road. And up a steep bank. And down the path toward the old sycamore and the swamp—and also toward the entrance to the cave, which is a long cave, as you know, and the other end comes out in the basement of Old Man Paddler’s log cabin back up in the hills.
“I’m thirsty,” Poetry puffed beside me.
“So am I,” I said, and right that second I remembered that when I’d gone to the spring in the first place, more than maybe an hour ago, I’d taken a pail from our milk house and was supposed to bring back a pail of sparkling cool water when I came home. “There isn’t any hurry,” Dad had told me, “but when you do come back, be sure to bring a pail of water.”
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 7-12 Page 42