Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 7-12

by Paul Hutchens

  He was running awfully fast for a barrel-shaped boy, and I was having a hard time keeping up with him as we raced along. We knew the fire warden didn’t live very far up that sandy lane—we had been there the year before and knew that his house was the nearest one that had a telephone. Santa didn’t have one in his cabin because he didn’t want his vacation spoiled by people calling him up. If he needed a telephone, he could always go to where there was one, he said.

  “Slow down,” I said to Poetry all of a sudden. “Maybe we’re on a wild-goose chase. Maybe we’re crazy to waste a lot of good sleeping time chasing an imaginary kidnapper. How do we know that was a kidnapper’s car? What if it was just anybody who got stuck in the sand? He wouldn’t appreciate having policemen stop him and ask a lot of questions!”

  “It wasn’t just anybody!” Poetry said. “That guy was down there in the boathouse less than a half hour ago, and there was a girl there too. See?”

  He stopped long enough to pull out of his pocket something he had picked up back there where the car had been, and it was a girl’s yellow scarf!

  “But that could be any woman’s or any girl’s scarf,” I said.

  “It could not,” Poetry disagreed with me with a very sure voice and also an excited one. “See that green paint on it—and look! Here’s some white paint too.”

  Well, I remembered Santa had been using green and white paint inside the boathouse that very afternoon, and remembering that put wings on my feet. I ran like a deer up that winding sandy road toward the fire warden’s house and a telephone.

  9

  If people had seen Poetry and me galloping down that narrow winding road, following the bobbing path of our flashlights, our breath coming in quick pants, they might have thought we were crazy It was one of the crookedest roads I’d ever seen in my life, and—would you believe it?—Poetry couldn’t resist puffing a part of a poem as we raced along toward the fire warden’s cabin. The poem started out like this:

  “There was a crooked man

  Who walked a crooked mile;

  He found a crooked sixpence

  Beside a crooked stile—”

  We didn’t find any sixpence, but we did find something else, and in a minute I’ll tell you what it was.

  Well, I knew we were ready to turn the last bend in the road just before we got to the fire warden’s house, when Poetry suddenly stopped running. He flashed his light down the road ahead of us, where, as plain as day, I saw a big beautiful reddish-brown deer standing right in the center of the road. Its head was up, and its antlers looked very pretty. Its ears were large and were spread out the way our old brindle cow back home spreads hers out when she is interested in something or scared. That deer was really scared. It turned, and like a reddish-brown flash it was gone, leaping away and disappearing into the trees at the side of the road.

  It’s a good thing we saw the deer, though. If we hadn’t, maybe we wouldn’t have stopped and wouldn’t have heard what we heard right that second. We both heard it at the same time, and it sounded exactly like what we’d heard before when we were standing out by the woodpile.

  “It’s another screech owl,” Poetry said and started on.

  I stopped him and said, “Maybe it’s a loon.”

  “It’s coming from out there in the trees,” he said. “Loons don’t stay up here in the woods. They’re out on the lake or else right close to it all the time.”

  We both listened, while my heart thumped like Dad’s hammer driving a terribly big nail into a log in our barn at Sugar Creek. The cry certainly sounded exactly like what we’d heard at the boathouse. I remembered the simple-looking owl we’d seen sitting in the hole of the hollow tree and how it had flown away, but this time I just knew it wasn’t any owl or any loon.

  “Let’s go see,” Poetry said.

  I said, “What if it’s the girl? What’ll we do? What’ll—”

  “Let’s decide later,” Poetry interrupted me.

  We flashed our lights out toward the trees and couldn’t see a thing, but we heard again that eerie cry that was like a loon being choked, and we started toward it. Our lights shoved back the dark as we went along, walking in their yellowish bobbing paths.

  We crept up slowly. I had a big stick in one hand, ready to use it as a club if I had to. For some reason we didn’t stop to think that maybe we ought to get to the fire warden’s house first and tell him. Instead we just kept right on going, the pine needles on the ground making a spooky noise under our shoes.

  Then Poetry stopped, and I, who had been following, bumped into him.

  “Look! There’s a blanket with somebody wrapped up in it!”

  It was a blanket of many colors, the kind almost all the families in Sugar Creek have in their homes.

  Then I heard a low, half-muffled half cry again, and we knew we’d found the kidnapped Ostberg girl.

  Well, when I looked down at that blanket with the little five-year-old girl wrapped in it, and saw the handkerchief the kidnapper had stuffed into her mouth to keep her from talking or screaming, and as we unwrapped her and saw that her hands and feet were tied together, and when I saw the pretty yellow all-tangled-up hair around her face and shoulders, I forgot all about having been half scared to death a while ago. Instead, I got a terribly angry feeling inside that made me want to find the kidnapper and for just about three minutes turn loose both of my fiery-tempered fists on his chin and nose and stomach and knock the living daylights out of him.

  My dad had told me true stories about how there are crazy or wicked men in the world who don’t have any respect for God or other people—and how every one of them ought to be locked up somewhere until a doctor can cure them, or else they should stay in jail for life or be executed for their awful crimes. Anyway, there ought not to be even one of them allowed to run free in this world, and if they are allowed to, it’s the law’s fault or the people’s fault.

  Well, we couldn’t stand there just staring and wasting good temper on something we couldn’t help. We had to get the fire warden quickly, and he would know what to do.

  Poetry certainly had presence of mind. “Take my flashlight,” he ordered. Almost before I could get it into my hand, he was stooped over and taking the gag out of the girl’s mouth and with his pocketknife was cutting the cords that were around her wrists and ankles.

  It was pitiful the way that little girl, who was only three or four years younger than Little Jim, sobbed when we got the handkerchief out of her mouth. She had a terribly scared look on her face. “Help!” she half cried but in a very muffled hoarse voice, as if she had been crying for a long time and had worn her vocal cords out.

  “Mama! Mama!” she cried. “I want my m-m-mama!” Then she would just go into hysterical sobbing, and we couldn’t understand a word she was saying.

  “We’re your friends,” we tried to tell her. “We’ve come to rescue you. We’ll help you get to the fire warden’s house and—”

  But the poor little thing was so scared that she couldn’t say a word we could understand, except that she wanted her mama. She was also so weak she couldn’t stand up and wouldn’t be able to walk the rest of the way to the fire warden’s house, and we didn’t think we ought to try to carry her.

  We had to do something quick, though, because she probably needed a doctor, so Poetry made me go on the run for the fire warden, while he stayed with the helpless girl. He would yell to us when we came back, he said, and flash his light so we would know where he and the girl were.

  I tell you, I ran, but I was trembling so much that it was hard for me to keep going.

  Soon I came in sight of some white birch saplings that crisscrossed each other, making a homemade gate. I could see a house just beyond and an old unpainted barn. Also there was a light in the window of what looked like an ordinary bungalow, which meant that maybe the fire warden hadn’t gone to bed yet.

  I lay down and squeezed myself under the gate and in a minute was knocking at the door of the bungalow.


  “Quick!” I panted as soon as the door opened. “We’ve found the kidnapped Ostberg girl! She’s out there in the trees wrapped up in a blanket and—” Right that second, I remembered about the car and its license number. I half yelled the things I wanted to say.

  The fire warden looked ridiculous in his green-striped pajamas as he stood in the doorway of his kitchen with a flashlight in his hand.

  “What is it?” a woman’s voice called from somewhere back in the house. It was probably the voice of his sleepy wife, who had just woke up and wanted to know what was going on.

  “Quick!” I said. “The license number is—” I told him “—and he’s got two half-flat tires and will have to stop somewhere at a gas station and get some air.”

  I guess maybe the fire warden must have known all about the Ostberg girl having been kidnapped, because it only took me a little while to explain enough to him so that he was ready for action. He was kind of an old man, but he was very spry and could think fast. While his wife was dressing somewhere in the house, he made two quick phone calls, and almost right away he got out his powerful electric lantern, and the three of us were on our way to his homemade gate.

  There he flashed his light around a little and said, “Well, what do you know—he must have thought our driveway was another bend in the road. He started to turn in, then swung out again. See?”

  I used my own flashlight on the tire tracks and saw, as plain as day, that some car had made a sharp turn there. And as sure as the nose on Dragonfly’s face, which, as you maybe know, turns south at the end, I noticed that the back tires had wider patterns than the front.

  We hurried up to where Poetry was waiting for us with the kidnapped girl. The little girl was still so scared that she couldn’t talk without great sobs getting mixed up with her words, and you couldn’t understand her very well. But the fire warden’s wife just knelt down on the ground beside that tangled-up-golden-haired girl, gathered her into her arms, and crooned to her as if she was her very own little girl. Then she stood up and, being a very strong woman, wouldn’t let her husband carry the girl but carried her herself and crooned to her all the way back to their house.

  When we first got to where Poetry was, I’d noticed he was standing with his New Testament in one hand, shining his flashlight on its pages and reading something.

  What on earth? I thought and waited for a chance to ask him what he was doing and why.

  On the way to the fire warden’s house, while I was wishing the rest of the gang was there and thinking that we’d have some wonderful stories to tell that would be even better than Paul Bunyan stories, and also that we could tell our folks the same ones, I said to Poetry, “What were you doing back there—reading stories to her to keep her quiet?”

  “No, I was looking at some Bible verses,” he said. “I’ll tell you tomorrow—or later, anyway.”

  Well, I’ve got to step on the gas with this story. We came to the birch sapling gate, and there we stood while I showed Poetry where the kidnapper had started to turn in and then made a sharp turn and gone on. Poetry held his flashlight down close to the ground and studied the patterns of the tracks and said, “He must have slowed down a lot right here, or the tire patterns wouldn’t be so plain.”

  Then we saw the headlights—and also a spotlight—of a car swinging down the road toward us real fast.

  “It’s the police already,” the fire warden said, and it was.

  There was certainly some excitement around there and also inside of me for a while.

  First, they made sure the girl was all right. In fact, Mrs. Fire Warden sat in the backseat of their car with the girl in her arms, and the girl was asleep. In another few minutes an ambulance was coming to take her to a hospital.

  “How’d you get here so quick?” Poetry asked one of the big blue-uniformed policemen.

  He answered in a pleasant voice, as though he thought a boy’s questions were as important as a grown-up’s. “We were only a few miles up the highway when the call came through on the radio, and so here we are!”

  Even before he had finished saying what he was saying, I was thinking how absolutely silly it is for anybody to think he can commit a crime and not get caught and punished sooner or later, even though they might not have caught the kidnapper yet.

  In the next seventeen minutes I saw one of the most interesting things I’d ever seen, and it made me even more sure that anybody—man or boy or woman or girl—was just plumb crazy to try to be smarter than the law is and get by with any kind of a crime or sin.

  I whispered it to Poetry when I saw what the policemen were doing, saying, “Nobody can get by with any kind of crime,” and Poetry, who is almost as good a Christian as Little Jim is, and who not only has a lot of poems on the tip of his tongue ready to be quoted any second but also knows many Bible verses, quoted one of them to me right that minute instead of a poem: “I was reading, ‘Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, this he will also reap.’” He added to it another, which was, “It is appointed for men to die once and after this comes judgment.”

  One of the cops heard him and looked up from what he was doing. “That’s right, son. That’s what my mother used to say.”

  Then we quit talking and in the light of the spotlight from the police car watched what was going on.

  What in the world? I thought when I saw one officer take what looked like a fishing tackle box out of his car, carry it to the gate, and set it down. Then he went back to the car and brought out something else.

  “What’s that?” Poetry wanted to know.

  And the friendly cop said, “A flashbulb camera with a reversible tripod. We’re going to snap a picture of these tire tracks.”

  Why? I thought but didn’t want to seem dumb enough to ask because I supposed Poetry knew.

  First, the officer laid a black cardboard down alongside the tire track, the edge of the cardboard looking like a ruler with little white inch-marks on it. Then he set up his camera with its lens focused on the track. As quick as a wink there was a blinding flash of light.

  Then he opened the kit that looked like a fishing tackle box and took out a spray can, like the kind Mom uses on flies and bugs and stuff in our garden. He began to spray something very carefully all over about two feet of the track.

  “It’s shellac,” the policeman said.

  I said, “Why?”

  And he said, “Wait and see,” which I had to do.

  Pretty soon he stopped spraying, screwed off the container at the bottom of the spraying device, and screwed on a can of something else and started in doing the same thing, pumping away very carefully, not letting the spray strike very hard on the sandy tracks, so as not to make any of the sand move.

  I looked at the other things in the kit, which was spread wide open in front of us. I saw what looked like a large salt shaker like the one Mom uses when she is cooking raw fried potatoes. Also there was a rubber cup, two other containers, a spoon and a spatula that looked like the long flat stick our doctor uses when he looks into my throat and makes me say, “Ah.”

  “The shellac makes the tire impression firm enough to stand the weight of the plaster of paris without crumbling it,” the officer said.

  And even though I didn’t understand what it was all about or why, it was very interesting to watch. Right away they started getting the plaster of paris ready. They mixed some in the rubber cup, doing it almost exactly the way I had seen our Sugar Creek dentist do it, and also the way we do it in school when we make an art plaque. The only difference was that they sprinkled in a little salt to make it harden quicker. The plaster of paris was poured on top of the water and allowed to sink to the bottom of the rubber cup until the water couldn’t take any more. Then it was stirred with a spoon and very carefully dipped out into the tire impressions.

  “What’s he doing now?” I asked Poetry, when some sticks and twigs and little pieces of string were laid on top of the first layer of plaster of paris.

/>   “I don’t know,” Poetry said. “Reinforcing it, maybe,” which, it turned out, the officer was doing. Right away they put on another, thicker,

  layer of plaster of paris, and then it was ready to let harden.

  After a while, when the officers were sure it was solid, they would just lift it up, and there would be a perfect plaster cast, a foot and a half long, of the tire marks, which, whenever they found the kidnapper’s car, would help them prove that he was really guilty.

  We couldn’t stay there all night, though, because tomorrow the gang had a lot of things to do and see. And besides, when a boy wants to be in good health, he has to have plenty of sleep at night, so the fire warden decided to drive us back to camp while the police looked around for other clues. We gave them the piece of glass and the yellow scarf with the paint on it and went with the fire warden back to camp to try to get some sleep, even though we were still excited. Boy, oh, boy, it had been a great experience!

  About an hour later, after waking up all the gang and telling them the news, we were in our tent again ready to sleep. The big hot round rock in the pail in the center of the tent certainly had helped keep the place warm.

  When I was in my sleeping bag again, as warm as toast, I felt that I had really done something important in life. I got to thinking about that little kidnapped girl, knowing how glad her parents would feel when they got the news, which they might have already. Maybe they were already on their way up here to see her. Of course, if she was really sick or had been mistreated terribly by the kidnapper, she might have to be in the hospital quite a while.

  For a few minutes just before I dropped off, I was listening to the waves lapping against our sandy shore and was thinking and thinking and thinking. I knew that if I had been standing by the shore looking out on the moonlit water, the rolling waves might look just like our oats field does down along Sugar Creek when the wind is blowing, waving and waving and rolling and rolling and rolling and looking very wonderful. And for a minute I could see my dad sitting up on our big tractor, driving along and maybe singing a song that nearly always, when Dad sang or whistled, was a hymn we used in our church. It might be the one that goes: