Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 7-12

by Paul Hutchens

  Before Barry could answer, Little Tom Till surprised us all by cutting in and saying across the crackling fire to Circus, “He meant, ‘Don’t be scared. From now on you’ll be what our Sugar Creek minister calls a soul winner.’”

  It was a wonderful true story, and for some reason I had the happiest feeling inside. I not only wished all of a sudden that I had been there and had maybe been Peter or Andrew or one of Zebedee’s two boys, but I felt also that maybe the most important thing in the world was to be a soul winner, or a fisher of men.

  Well, Barry’s story was done, and the sky above the lake toward where the sun had gone down reminded me of the reddish, purplish, and also yellowish spread-out feathers of a terribly big fantail pigeon.

  5

  I was sitting there on a small log, looking at the extra beautiful sky over the top of our campfire, thinking about how the rays of the sun shooting up looked like a lady’s many-colored unfolded fan or the tail of a fantail pigeon, when Barry said, “One of the sporting clubs up here is offering a prize for the best original Paul Bunyan story. Here’s a chance for you boys to stretch your imaginations a little.”

  Since it seemed a good idea, we decided to see who of us could make up the best one. So after we’d listened to Barry tell us that Bible story about something that had really happened on Galilee Lake once, we all took turns telling made-up stories.

  We were all racking our brains to see if we could think of something about Paul Bunyan that nobody had ever thought of before, which Barry might decide was good enough to write about and send in to the contest.

  We made up different things, such as:

  One time Paul Bunyan gave a wintertime party in a terribly big recreational center in Bemidji, and so many people answered his invitation and came that there wasn’t any place to hang their fur coats and other heavy clothes.

  So Paul went out and blew on his horn, and hundreds of huge antlered deer came running in from all directions. Paul stood them up all around the outer wall of the building, each one of them facing the center, and the people hung their fur coats and other kinds of different-colored coats on the antlers, using them for what is called “costumers.” Those deer stood there patiently, without moving, with their kind eyes watching the guests.

  Everything was going fine until somebody opened all the doors to let in some fresh air. All of a sudden, old Babe, the blue ox, came in and started lumbering around looking for Paul. He stamped his hoofs and snorted like a mad bull, and the people got scared and excited, and the women started screaming, and that scared the hundreds of deer, and they bolted for the doors in a mad and wild scramble. Since the doors all around them were open, they took all the coats with them.

  That was Big Jim’s story, and when he told it I remembered that he always got very good grades in English in the Sugar Creek School.

  Dragonfly said Paul Bunyan got hay fever so bad and sneezed so hard and so many times in succession that it blew a whole forest over.

  Poetry said Paul Bunyan ate so many blackberry pies and got so big that, when he went in swimming in Leech Lake and splashed around a lot, water splashed out of the lake for hundreds of miles around. It made a thousand new lakes so that the ten thousand lakes that Minnesota had at first were changed to eleven thousand.

  Circus said that the day Paul ate Poetry’s blackberry pies he had to have toothpicks to pick the seeds out from between his teeth, so he cut down some Norway pines with his jack-knife, which was seven feet long, and used them for toothpicks.

  Dragonfly looked at me and my red hair with a mischievous look in his dragonflylike eyes and told another story real quick: Paul’s long hair was so red that, when he was asleep one windy day, the Indians saw it blowing in the wind and thought it was a forest fire. They threw water all over him, and ever since then all red-haired people have been all wet.

  Well, that was supposed to be funny, and most everybody around the campfire thought it was and laughed hard. But it wasn’t funny. For a minute I was almost mad but decided it would be a waste of good temper to spoil what the others thought funny. Besides, my dad says any boy who wants to get along with people can’t afford to always be taking offense.

  I couldn’t think of anything about Paul Bunyan that would help me get even with Dragonfly, so I let Little Jim tell his story, and then we didn’t have time for mine, because it was time to go to bed.

  I watched Little Jim’s small friendly face in the firelight and in the light of the afterglow of the sun, which had already gone to bed, and he looked so innocent that you couldn’t tell whether he was thinking or not. But it was fun to listen to him, because his mouselike voice squeaked out the strangest story, which really sounded good.

  He began: “Well, when Paul and I were up here in this pretty country of many lakes, we got awful lonesome and wished there were some other people living here. We stayed down where Brainerd is now, and Paul would carry me around in his vest pocket and tell me stories and complain about how lonesome he was.”

  It sounded as if Little Jim was going to have a real good story, so I listened, and sure enough it was. That little innocent-faced guy said Paul Bunyan finally got so lonesome that he took his long brown flashlight and some different-colored cellophane and stood the flashlight—which was two hundred feet long—up on the ground, and built a wooden platform around it right at the place where the switch was.

  Every night Little Jim sat on that platform of the two-hundred-feet-tall flashlight and turned that light on and off and on and off. Paul would stand beside the flashlight and slide different-colored pieces of cellophane paper across the top of the flashlight, and the whole sky was all lit up in many different colors every night, changing just like the beautiful northern lights. (I thought that maybe the sky above the lake had made Little Jim think about the different colors.)

  In a week or so, people from Iowa, Missouri, Tennessee, and all the Southern states began to come up North to see what they thought were the northern lights. They liked the country so well they decided to stay and build their homes, which they did, and so the town of Brainerd was founded. And then Paul just left his flashlight standing, and the people took the big batteries out and used it for a water tower, where it still stands in downtown Brainerd.

  Well, it was a cute idea, and I wished I could think of something good, but I couldn’t, so we broke up our campfire circle.

  Santa stood and yawned and stretched his big self into a straightened-up posture. He looked straight at Tom Till and said, “How about a spin on the lake with my new outboard motor, Tom?”

  I remembered that Santa and Mrs. Santa didn’t have any children of their own, and that last year he had liked Tom so well and had also been the one who had shown Tom how to become a Christian. I knew too that Tom’s dad was an unbeliever and was hardly ever kind to him, and maybe Tom was hungry for some grown-up person to like him. So I felt happy inside that Tom was going to get a fast boat ride, although I wanted to go along more than anything.

  “You, too, Bill—and Poetry, if you like,” Santa said, “if you can spare them awhile, Barry. I’ll take the rest of the gang tomorrow. This new motor needs breaking in, you know.”

  Well, it was all right with Barry, and it certainly was all right with me, so away we four went toward the sandy shore where Santa’s big white boat was beached. Each of us took our life preserver vest and put it on before getting into the boat.

  The lake looked wonderful, having as many colors as the sky itself, which meant that a lake got its color from the sky, I thought. I said to Poetry, “Looks like old Babe, the ox, must have changed his colors like a chameleon and taken a swim out here while we were telling stories.”

  And Poetry surprised me by yelling, “Great, Bill. That’s wonderful! Hey, you guys back there! Bill’s got a good story!”

  Well, it made me feel half proud of myself to have Poetry yell that to the gang, and I liked Poetry a lot for a minute. That was one of the reasons I liked him anyway—he was always making anoth
er person feel he was worth something.

  It certainly felt fine to sit in the prow of Santa’s boat, with Tom Till and Poetry in the middle and Santa himself in the stern, and go roaring out across the lake. In the afterglow of the sunset the lake was pretty, and without much wind it was as smooth as Mom’s mirror in our living room at home. I was wishing Dad and Mom were there to see things. But I wouldn’t want them to stay, because I wanted to have some real exciting adventures to tell them about when we got home.

  Pretty soon our boat cut a wide circle around the end of a neck of land, and we went roaring down the other side maybe a hundred feet from shore. It was still a little light on the lake, but the pine trees on the shore looked dark, and it was getting dark fast.

  I was wondering if we would run into any exciting adventures up here in the North when Poetry said, “Look, Bill! Right there’s where our boat upset last year and tossed us out. And right there’s where I hooked that big northern pike.”

  I remembered. I yelled back and said so and then went on thinking—wishing we’d have some kind of scary excitement as well as a lot of fun camping.

  I watched the widening waves that spread out behind us like a great V. I felt fine and happy. For some reason I liked everybody. Also I was remembering the Bible story Barry had told and how Peter was afraid to have the Lord anywhere near him because he was a sinner. I began to feel that God was real close to all of us, and I wasn’t a bit scared of Him, because I knew that He had washed all my sins away, which our Sugar Creek minister and Little Jim say is what He does for a boy—or anybody—who will really let Him.

  Just then Poetry yelled to me, “Penny for your thoughts, Bill!”

  I jumped and looked at him and said, “Look at that reddish sky, will you?”

  Poetry looked and said, “Kind of pretty, isn’t it?”

  6

  We docked and went into Santa’s log cabin with him. It was cozy inside. First, he lit two old-fashioned kerosene lamps. Then, because it might get cold pretty soon, we helped him start a fire in his small woodstove in a corner. Tom pumped a pail of water from the pitcher pump inside the cabin. Santa even had an icebox, and twin beds in another small room. In a tiny room way in the back there was a bathtub and beside it a very old-fashioned trunk that for some reason made me think of Robinson Crusoe and buried treasure.

  I wished harder than ever that we would run into a mystery up here in the North. I was all tingling inside, wanting one so bad. Of course, I wouldn’t want the kind that would scare a boy half to death, like the ones that sometimes happened to the Sugar Creek Gang. But I wanted an ordinary mystery anyway.

  Soon it would be time to go back to camp and get to sleep. I was wondering how we could keep warm in our cold tents when there wouldn’t be any fires inside and we didn’t have any heaters. Of course I knew I’d be pretty warm myself after I’d crawled into my sleeping bag. But it’d be cold to get undressed before getting into my pajamas.

  Santa showed us different things in his cottage, such as a large mounted fish on the wall, which Mrs. Santa had caught, and also a great bearskin rug on the floor, which had a fierce bear’s head with a wide-open red mouth on one end of it. Also there was a snakeskin on the wall, which a missionary in Africa had sent him.

  When it was time to go home, Poetry looked at Santa’s woodbox and said all of a sudden, “You need a load of wood—better let Bill carry one in for you.”

  “Fine,” I said. “I’ll hold the flashlight for you.” I took a flashlight off the table and started toward the door with Poetry right after me.

  When we were outside, we looked back through the window of the pretty little cabin at Santa and Tom standing by the fire warming themselves, and all of a sudden Poetry said, “I wish Tom had a dad like—I wish Santa was Tom’s dad.”

  I thought of old hook-nosed John Till at Sugar Creek and knew that at that very minute he was probably standing at the bar in a beer joint and that maybe Tom’s mother was not even going to have enough money to buy groceries for the family the rest of that week.

  At the long woodpile, Poetry and I stopped. He said, “Sh! Turn off the light. I heard something.”

  I snapped off the flashlight, peered out into the dark, and listened. “It’s a crazy loon,” I said, when one of those diving birds away out on the dark lake somewhere let out a longtailed quavering cry, which came echoing across to where we were. Right away another loon, closer to the shore, answered him.

  And then my hair started to stand up on end, because I heard another sound almost like that of a loon, but it wasn’t coming from that lake. It sounded like a little girl crying, and it came from over in the direction of the boat-house where Santa kept his boat in the winter and his tools and oars and things in the summer.

  Then I heard the sound again, plain as day, a faint cry like a loon that somebody was trying to smother, maybe with his fingers on its throat.

  Poetry’s hand was tightening on my shoulder. His face was close to my neck, and I could hear and feel him breathing. “Over there,” he whispered huskily, “close to the boathouse. Down!” He drew me down beside him, both of us hiding behind the woodpile.

  Before I ducked, though, I looked in the direction of the boathouse. It was up against the edge of a steep hill, and I saw a tiny glow as if somebody had drawn on a cigarette or cigar and it had made a glow in the dark.

  I knew it couldn’t be any of our camping party smoking because none of us smoked, not even Barry.

  Then I heard the boathouse door creaking on its hinges, and I knew I was beginning to be scared.

  “It’s a man smoking,” Poetry hissed in my ear.

  But I didn’t want to believe it. “Maybe it was a lightning bug,” I said. There were several of them flashing their spooky little lamps on and off out near Santa’s boat.

  “Lightning bugs’ lights are a yellowish green,” Poetry said, “and that was a reddish glow.”

  I knew he was right but hoped, in spite of wanting a mystery, that whatever it was wasn’t some criminal. Then I heard what sounded like a stifled cry again, and I knew it wasn’t any loon. I said to Poetry, “Maybe it’s a loon’s echo.”

  I had the flashlight in my hand and without thinking, just doing what I wanted to, I shot its long white beam straight toward the boathouse, up against the hill.

  Poetry reached out a hand and grabbed my arm and smothered the light against his side, but not before I saw what I saw, which was a dark shadow of something dart behind the boathouse.

  “Don’t scare whatever it is,” Poetry said. “Give me time to think what to do.” Poetry, as you know, is the one of our gang who wanted to be a detective and knew more about being one than any of the rest of us.

  We both ducked behind the woodpile again and knelt on a pile of sawdust, which might have been left there when somebody cut the wood with a buzz saw. Even with a scary mystery just around the corner, Poetry quoted something he had memorized, which was:

  “If a wood saw would saw wood,

  How much wood would the wood saw saw

  If the wood saw would saw wood?”

  “I thought you wanted to think,” I said to him.

  “I am,” he said. “I think best when I have what books call a ‘poetic muse.’ Did you notice what I noticed?” he asked me.

  “What?” I said.

  And he answered, “That the boathouse has had a new coat of paint since we were here last year.”

  “I saw a shadow move,” I answered him. I was trembling inside and listening toward the boathouse.

  We kept on listening but didn’t hear a thing, so we decided to turn the flashlight on the boathouse again. It was painted a nice, pretty green color. It even looked as if it had just been painted.

  “Smell the paint?” Poetry said, and I did—for the first time.

  That green boathouse had its door closed and looked as innocent as Little Jim’s face. There wasn’t a sound of any kind. A lonely loon let out a wavering wail from across the lake, and anot
her one answered him from close to the shore, not far from the dock where we had just left Santa’s boat. But there wasn’t another sound anywhere.

  “What about the door creaking on its hinges?” I said.

  “Just remember it when we start questioning the suspect later on,” Poetry said, and his voice was as calm as if he was actually a detective. But his hand was on my arm, and I could feel it trembling a little.

  We loaded up our arms with wood as quick as we could and started toward the cottage.

  We were both shaking when we got inside, but we’d made up our minds to keep quiet so as not to scare Tom Till. Also, if we were only imagining things because we wanted a mystery to solve, and if there really wasn’t any, we didn’t want to seem silly to anybody except ourselves, which wouldn’t be so bad.

  We unloaded our two armloads of wood into the big woodbox in the corner beside the stove and then looked around. I saw on the table a copy of a Minneapolis newspaper and on the front page a big headline that said, “Fear Ostberg Kidnapper Hiding in Chippewa Forest.”

  I stared and stared at the headline and sidled quickly over to the table. In the light of the flashlight—the kerosene lamp wasn’t bright enough—I read the whole story. I was remembering the radio program I’d heard back in our house at Sugar Creek—about a little girl being kidnapped in St. Paul.

  Poetry came over, and we read the newspaper article together while Santa and Tom Till were opening the icebox and getting out some bottles of pop. Poetry’s hand was gripping my arm so tight that it hurt, but I didn’t say a word.

  I was concentrating on the news story of the little girl who had been taken from her home and hadn’t been found yet. I was thinking that the kidnapper, whoever he was, might be right that minute out there in Santa’s boathouse, and the Ostberg girl too. The father of the little golden-haired girl had already paid the ransom money of $25,000, but the kidnapper hadn’t left the girl where he’d promised to.