“I will,” I had said to him, and now as we raced past the spring, I remembered that the water pail was on a flat stone down at the bottom of the hill by the spring.
“Who do you suppose is writing all these notes?” I said to Poetry, forgetting the water again.
“Yeah, who do you suppose?” Poetry said from behind me.
“Come on, you guys!” Dragonfly yelled back to us from up ahead, and we all swished on.
It was quite a long run to the sycamore tree, but we got there quick and found Circus and Big Jim already inside the big long opening in its side, looking for the letter or whatever it was we were supposed to find. In a jiffy Circus had out a paper and was waving it around in the air for us to see.
When we gathered around, I saw that it was an envelope with our names on it, but this was an actual honest-to-goodness letter with a postmark. When I got close enough to see, I saw it said “Pass Lake, Minnesota.”
And something in my heart went flippety-flop. I just knew who the letter was from. For some reason I knew what was going to be inside. It was going to be a letter from the same friendly big man on whose Pass Lake property we’d had our camp last summer, and he was inviting us to come up again for a week or two or maybe more.
It certainly didn’t take us long to find out that I was right, which I knew I was.
“It’s from Santa Claus!” Dragonfly said.
Santa Claus was the name we’d given the man whom we’d liked so well on our camping trip and whose wife had made such good blackberry pies.
We all read the letter and felt so wonderful inside we wanted to yell and scream.
“Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!”
There was one paragraph in the letter that bothered us, though, and it was:
Be sure, of course, to get your parents’ consent, all of you, and be sure to bring along your fishing tackle. Fishing is good. Little Snow-in-the-Face will be eager to see you all. He has been very sick this past week and has been taken to the government hospital. Be sure to pray for him. His big brother, Eagle Eye, still has a Sunday school going here, but his mother and father are not yet believers on the Lord Jesus Christ, and that makes it hard for him. But Snow-in-the-Face is a very brave little Christian.
And right that second, we heard footsteps coming in our direction. Looking up, I saw a brown smiling face and a row of shining white teeth with one all-gold tooth right in front, and I knew it was Barry Boyland, Old Man Paddler’s nephew, who had taken us to Pass Lake last year.
“Hi, gang!” he called to us, and we called back to him, “Hello, Barry.” Then we all swarmed around him to tell him about the letter and to ask questions, all of us knowing that he was the one who had written the notes for us, just to make the last letter more mysterious and more of a surprise.
Well, it was time to go home and try to convince our parents that we all needed a vacation very badly. For some reason I wasn’t sure my folks would say I could go.
3
How’ll we do it?” I asked Poetry, as he and Dragonfly and I stopped at our gate to let them go on home and to let me go on in.
“How’ll we do what?” Dragonfly wanted to know, and right away he sneezed at something or other, probably at some of the flowers in Mom’s little flower bed around our mailbox.
Dragonfly reached into his hip pocket and pulled out his dad’s big red handkerchief and grabbed his nose just in time to stop most of the next three sneezes, which came in one-two-three style, as fast as a boy pounding a nail with a hammer.
“How’ll we convince our parents that we need a vacation?” Poetry said.
And Dragonfly said, “People take vacations when they’re worn out from too much work.”
“Overworking?” I said.
Dragonfly sneezed again and looked down at Mom’s very pretty, happy-looking, different-colored gladiola in the half-moon flower bed around the mailbox.
“If you don’t quit planting gladiola around here, I can’t come over and play here anymore.”
“Or work, either,” Poetry said.
And I said, “Well, you guys better beat it. I’ve got to overwork a little.”
I opened our gate, squeezed through it, and started on the run for our toolshed, where I found a nice clean hoe—which I’d cleaned myself the last time I’d used it—and soon I was out in the garden hoeing potatoes as hard as I could, getting hotter and hotter and sweating like everything. Sweat was running off my face, and I could feel it on my back too. With a little wind blowing across from the woods and Sugar Creek, I felt fine even in the hot sun. I certainly wasn’t getting tired as fast as I thought I would. When a boy sweats at hard work and the wind blows a little, he feels better than when he just kind of lies around and tries to keep cool.
I wished Dad, who had gone somewhere for something, would hurry home and see me working hard. It was almost fun hoeing the potatoes, though it was hard not to stop at the end of each row and pick and eat a few luscious blackberries that grew there. In fact, I did stop a few times, which is maybe why I got to the end of each row quicker.
Once I got thirsty and went into the house for a drink of water, and Mom called out to the kitchen from the living room and said, “Is that you, Theodore?” which is Dad’s first name.
“Nope, it’s just me,” I said.
“Come on in a minute, Bill. Somebody wants to see you.”
“Who?” I said, wondering who it was and hoping it wasn’t anybody I didn’t know.
I peeked around the corner of the kitchen door and saw my lady Sunday school teacher. All of a sudden I felt good, although a little bashful because I was in my overalls and was probably very dusty and sweaty and maybe had my hair mussed up.
We said a few polite words to each other, and she said, “I brought you that book of Indian stories.”
And right away I was thinking of little Snow-in-the-Face up North and wishing I could see him again.
I thanked her for the book, saying, “Well—thanks, that’s great—I mean, thank you so very much,” which was what I thought Mom would want me to say in the way I said it.
“Don’t overwork,” she said to me with a smile in her voice, and I said, “I will.”
I was going out the kitchen door before I knew I’d said the wrong thing. She certainly was a good Sunday school teacher, though. She knew how to make a boy like her and also want to come back to Sunday school every Sunday.
Just as I was about to let the door shut behind me quietly the way I do when we have company, I heard the radio in the living room, and I knew that maybe Mom and my teacher had been listening when I came in and had turned it low for a while.
One of the things I heard was news about a little St. Paul, Minnesota, girl named Marie Ostberg having been kidnapped and a reward being offered by the father. Then I heard the announcer mention something that I thought was a wonderful idea. He said, “Duluth—the hay fever colony—will have thousands of new visitors this year because the heavy rains throughout the nation have made it the worst for pollen in many years. Thousands will be going north …”
That would give us two reasons that some of the gang ought to get to go, I thought—overwork and hay fever. Dragonfly had the hay fever, and if I worked extra hard, I might overwork, although it’d be easier to have hay fever if I could only get it.
While I was picking up the hoe to go back to the potatoes, I heard our car horn, and Dad was at the gate, waiting for me to come and open it. Was I ever glad I was hot and sweaty and that there were four or five long rows of potatoes already hoed, which Dad could see himself.
“Hi,” I said to my reddish-brownish-mustached dad. And he just lifted one of his big farmer hands and saluted me as if I was an officer in the army and he only a private. I swung open the gate, and, seeing the gladiola by the mailbox, stopped and took three or four quick, deep sniffs at them, just as Dad swung the car inside and stopped beside the big plum tree by the graveled driveway.
Then I looked quickly at the sun, to see if I could sn
eeze, and I actually did, three times in quick succession, just as Dad turned off the motor and heard me do it.
“I hope you aren’t going to catch cold,” he said and looked at me suspiciously. “You boys go in swimming today?”
“The water was almost too hot,” I said. “I never felt better in my life, only—” Right that second, something in my nose tickled again, and I sneezed and was glad of it. “Maybe I’m allergic to something down here.”
“Down where?” Dad said, looking at me from under his heavy eyebrows, which I noticed weren’t up anymore but were starting to drop a little in the middle, as though he was wondering, What on earth? and trying to figure me out, like a problem in arithmetic.
“I mean—” I started to answer and then decided maybe it was the wrong time to talk to Dad about what I wanted to talk to him about. So I said, “Well, I better get back to those potatoes. There are only two more rows.”
“Back to them?” Dad said, astonished. “You mean …” He slid out of our long green car and looked toward the garden.
Even from where we were, you could see that somebody had been hoeing potatoes.
“Well, what do you know about that? That’s wonderful! That’s unusual! That’s astonishing!” which I knew was some of Dad’s friendly sarcasm, which he was always using on me, and I sort of liked it, because Dad and I were good friends even though he was my dad and I was his red-haired, freckled-faced overworked boy, who didn’t have hay fever yet but was trying to get it.
Then I sneezed again, and Dad looked at me and said, “What’s that grin on your face for?” and I said, “Is there a grin on my face?”
“There certainly is,” he said.
I sighed and wished I could sneeze again, which for some reason I did, without even trying to or looking at the sun or smelling the gladiola or anything, and I got a quick hope that maybe I was actually going to get hay fever.
Dad took out a paper bag, which had something in it he’d probably bought somewhere in town, and banged the car door shut. Then he said, “Maybe you’ve been working too hard and been sweating, and—with the wind blowing—you need a dry shirt. Better come in the house and help your mother and Charlotte Ann and me eat this ice cream,” which I did.
My Sunday school teacher helped also, since she was the reason Dad had hurried to town to get the ice cream in the first place.
Then Mom told me to gather the eggs, which I started out to do—and ran ker-smack into something very interesting.
I was up in our haymow looking for old Bent Comb’s nest for her daily egg, which was always there if she laid one, although sometimes she missed a day.
“Well, what do you know?” I said to myself when I climbed up over the alfalfa to her corner. Old Bent Comb was still on the nest, and her pretty bent comb was hanging down over her left eye. She was sitting there as if she owned the whole haymow and who was I to be intruding?
“Hi, old Bent Comb!” I said. “How’re you this afternoon? Got your egg laid yet?”
She didn’t budge. She just squatted down lower with her wings all spread out, covering the whole nest.
“Where’s your egg?” I said and reached out my hand toward her.
And zip-zip-peck! As quick as lightning her sharp bill pecked me on the hand and wrist. She wouldn’t let me get near her without pecking, and when I tried to lift her off to see if she’d laid an egg today, she was mad as anything. She complained as if she was being mistreated and gave out a sad, disgruntled string of cluck-cluck-clucks at me and at the whole world. I let her stay.
Then I scooted down the ladder and ran ker-whiz to the house, stormed into our back door, and said, “Hey, Mom, old Bent Comb wants to set! What’ll we do?—break her up or let her set?”
“For land’s sake,” Mom said to me, “don’t knock the world off its hinges! What? Old Bent Comb!”
“Actually!” I said. “Up in the haymow!”
“We’ll break her up,” she said. “We can’t have her hatching a nest of chickens up there.”
“Couldn’t we make her a nest down here out by the grape arbor? Couldn’t we put her in the new coop Dad and I made?”
“Better break her up,” Mom said. “She’s one of our best laying hens. If we set her, she’ll be busy all summer raising her family, and not an egg will we get.”
“But we break her up every year, and she never has a family of her own,” I said. “I think she’d look awfully proud and pretty strutting around the barnyard with a whole flock of little white chickens following her.”
That’s one of the prettiest sights a boy ever sees on a farm—a mother hen with a family of fuzzy-wuzzy little chickens behind and beside and in front of her, running quick whenever she clucks for them to come. Then they all gather around her and eat the different things she finds for them, such as small bugs, pieces of barnyard food, small grains of this or that, and just plain stuff.
“Well, maybe you’re right,” Mom said all of a sudden. “Let’s set her. First, let’s get her nest ready and select fifteen of the nicest leghorn eggs we can find and have them ready for her. Then you go get her and bring her down.”
“She won’t want to leave her nice warm nest up in the haymow,” I said to Mom, looking up at her pretty, kind face under its blue sun-bonnet.
“No, she won’t,” Mom said back to me, “but she’ll do it if we work it right. Hens are very particular about moving from one nest to another. Maybe we’ll have to shut her up in the coop.”
Well, setting a hen was one of the most interesting things I liked to do around the farm. First, we took a nice brand-new chicken coop, which was just about as high as halfway between my knees and my belt. Then we scooped out a round hole a foot in diameter in the ground close to our grape arbor, making it only a few inches deep. We lined it with nice clean straw and then selected fifteen of the prettiest, cleanest white eggs we could find, which had been laid that very day by the other leghorn hens and which probably would hatch.
Then I ran lickety-sizzle to the barn, scooted up the ladder into the haymow, and in spite of Bent Comb’s being very angry and not wanting to leave her nest, I got her under one arm and brought her down.
Soon Mom and I were ready to put her in the coop. I stooped down first and looked into the dark inside, and there were the prettiest, nicest, most beautiful fifteen eggs you ever saw, all side by side. The coop had a roof on it but no floor—only the ground with the straw nest on it.
I pushed Bent Comb very gently and in a friendly way up to the hole in the front of the coop and let her look in at the nestful of eggs. She had been clucking like everything and whining and complaining in a sad voice, which meant she wanted to be the mother of a whole flock of little chickens. But she was mad at me and didn’t want to go in. She kept turning away from the hole in the coop, not even looking at the nice new nest.
So I said to her, “OK, Bent Comb, I’ll take you out and show you what will happen to you if you don’t sit on those eggs.”
I took her in both hands, holding her tight so she wouldn’t squirm loose and get away. I walked with her to the chicken house and around behind it to where there was a peach tree under which we had a pen with chicken wire all around and on top. Inside were nine or a dozen of our best laying hens who had wanted to set but whom we decided to “break up” instead of letting them have their stubborn hen way.
There they were, all shut up by themselves. Some of them were walking around with their wings all spread out, clucking as if they wanted a bunch of little chickens to come and crawl under them. And they were cluck-cluck-clucking in a sad, whining tone of voice.
Over in one corner was a white egg, which meant that one of the hens had already given up wanting to “set” and was behaving herself again like a good laying hen. And I knew that as soon as we could decide which hen it was, we’d take her out and let her have her liberty again.
“See there,” I said to Bent Comb. “Look at those lonesome old hens! They’re clucking around just like you’v
e been doing. Every one of them wanted a family of her own, and not one of them is going to get it! If you don’t be good and go in that coop like we want you to, we’ll have to shut you up in here and leave you for two whole weeks, which we do to all hens who want to set and we won’t let ’em.”
But Bent Comb wasn’t interested at all. She absolutely refused to look, so I took her back to the coop. “I’m going to give you one more chance,” I said. “I want you to go in there carefully, not breaking any of those eggs, and behave yourself.”
Once more I got down on my knees, holding her carefully as though she was a very good friend—which she was—and so she could look in and see for herself what we wanted her to do.
Well sir, this time she must have decided to be good, because all of a sudden she quit struggling and looked in as if she’d made up her mind that it might be a good place for her for a while. Without my doing any pushing or anything, she very slowly started to creep inside the doorway toward the eggs. The next thing I knew she was on the nest, turning around and settling herself down and spreading her wings and covering every one of those fifteen eggs with her feathers.
I turned and yelled, “Mom! She’s gone in! She’s going to set!”
“Put the board over the hole for a while,” Mom said, “so she can’t get out. Let her stay until she feels at home, and then she’ll go back every time we let her out for exercise and water and food.”
I put the rectangular-shaped board over the door of Bent Comb’s house and propped it shut with a brick, so she couldn’t get out.
And so we “set” my favorite hen, old Bent Comb. In just three weeks there’d be a whole nestful of cheeping chicks and a very proud mama hen. I sat down for a minute on the roof of her house to rest. I was almost overworked, I started to think.
Then Dad yelled, “Hey, Bill, come on out here! We’ve got to get the rest of the chores done!”
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 7-12 Page 43