Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 19-24

by Paul Hutchens

  Nothing happened of any importance till after dinner, which at Sugar Creek we would have called supper.

  I’d thought Barry seemed a little anxious about something while we were in the dining room. He hardly noticed the pretty murals, except to tell us they were enlarged photographs in full color of actual cherry trees, with grass and dandelions underneath and a gravel road running past. They covered one whole wall of the dining room.

  He kept looking around, and whenever what is called a “page” went through, calling out names of people wanted on the phone, he seemed to hope his own name would be called.

  We hadn’t any sooner gotten back to our rooms and settled down a little than the phone rang. I was closest to it and, in a mischievous mood, pretended a dignified voice and answered, saying, “Room 423, the Hastings Hotel. William Collins speaking.”

  I certainly felt foolish a second later when a woman’s voice said, “May I speak to Barry, please—Mr. Boyland, I mean?”

  I felt and heard myself gulp, then I answered, “Certainly. Just a moment.”

  I didn’t have to call Barry, though. He had been sitting under a floor lamp on the other side of the room, reading a book called Hunting in the Great Northwest and taking notes with his green pen, maybe jotting down things he could quote in the important paper he was going to write for his college class.

  Well, the very second the phone rang, he was out of his chair like a rabbit scared out of its hole. Almost before I could hand him the phone, he had it and was saying, “Hello!” in a voice that sounded as if he was all alone with somebody he liked extrawell and was telling her something nobody else was supposed to hear.

  Maybe it wasn’t polite for me to listen, but how could I help it? It wouldn’t have been polite for me to stop my ears, would it?

  I couldn’t tell what the woman’s musical voice on the other end of the line was saying, but Barry’s deep-voiced answers were like a boy’s hand stroking a baby rabbit in the palm of his other hand. He was talking to her about his trip into the frozen North and asking her not to worry, that he’d be all right.

  “Yes,” Barry was saying to the person I imagined was his age and was pretty and could smile like our Sugar Creek teacher, Miss Lilly. “I’ll be careful. I have six bodyguards, you know.”

  And then, all of a sudden, Barry was saying, “Yes. I think I can run over for a few minutes.”

  He put down the phone, turned back into the room, and said, with excitement in his eyes but with a very calm voice, “I’ll have to be gone for an hour or so, boys. You can wait here, or you may go down to the basement game room for Ping-Pong—but mind you, no disturbance! Remember who you are.”

  “Your mother worried about you, too?” Little Jim asked, and I knew he was thinking that whoever called Barry was Barry’s own mother, giving him last-minute instructions to take care of himself.

  Barry looked at Little Jim with a faraway expression in his eyes. Then he grinned and answered, “Every good mother worries a little.”

  Maybe I shouldn’t have said what I did just then, but I might not have been able to help it even if I’d tried. This is what came out of my mind as I answered Little Jim, “His mother is maybe only about twenty years old.”

  Barry shot me a quick look with a grin in it and right away put in a phone call for a taxi. He got his heavy brown storm coat out of the closet, put it on, brushed a few flecks of dust off its dark-brown mouton collar, took another look in the mirror at his hair, ran his hand over his chin to see if he needed a shave, decided he didn’t—or if he did, he wouldn’t have time to give himself one—and a minute later was out the door and gone.

  His idea that we might want to go to the game room in the basement was a good one. So pretty soon, Big Jim, who had charge of us, gave the order, and pretty soon after that we were in the basement playing noisy sets of the same kind of table tennis we sometimes played in Poetry’s basement back home.

  I watched for my chance to talk to Poetry alone for a few minutes, because I had something special on my mind. When he and I finished a game and handed our paddles to Dragonfly and Little Jim, we took the elevator to the hotel lobby.

  We knew it wasn’t supposed to be good for a boy to eat hard-to-digest candy before going to bed, so we bought the kind of candy bar we liked best and hoped it wouldn’t be hard to digest.

  Poetry said, as he unwrapped his, “My jaw muscles haven’t had any exercise since we were eating dinner beside the cherry trees.”

  “Supper,” I said.

  “Dinner,” he countered and added, “the people back at Sugar Creek are behind the times!”

  We were in two big leather-upholstered chairs behind a potted palm at the time. Ignoring what Poetry thought was a bright remark, I told him about the cheerful woman’s voice I’d heard on the phone, asking for Barry. “She wasn’t any more his mother than the man in the moon is a man,” I said.

  Poetry let out a low whistle, squinted his eyes, then said, “Poor Barry,” and shook his head sadly.

  “How come you say that?” I asked.

  He sighed, took another bite of his bar, shook his head again sadly, and answered, “Life is more fun being a boy—without growing up and having a girl to worry about.”

  Neither of us said anything for a few minutes, while I thought about the happiness I’d seen in Barry’s eyes when he was flying around the room getting his tie straight, his coat on, the dust off its lapels, and running his hand over his chin the way Dad does to see if he needs a shave.

  There was a radio on in the hotel lobby, and somebody’s voice was racing along very fast, giving a news program. My mind was so busy thinking about Barry and wondering where he was and when he would be back that I hardly noticed the news announcement about the weather. It was something about “unseasonably warm weather in northern Minnesota continuing for another week.” I could see, out the hotel’s large picture window, the stars twinkling in an absolutely clear sky.

  Poetry and I, behind our potted palm-pretending we were in a climate where palm trees grow naturally, such as at the very bottom of the United States where we had spent a whole week’s winter vacation with Mom and Dad and Dragonfly’s parents—sat munching away, talking dreamily about imaginary things:

  “See those seagulls up there, tossing around in the hot summer air?” he asked.

  I answered lazily, “Don’t make me open my eyes. I’m too sleepy here on this sandy beach under this palm tree.”

  “All right, then. See those snow geese flying? See that beautiful white snow goose, with black wing tips and a pink beak, headed north to the lodge?”

  I yawned lazily, my nine-o’clock-at-night imagination making me feel sleepy. “I don’t know what Barry went after in such a hurry, but I wish he’d come back. It’s my bedtime.”

  And that’s when Barry came breezing into the lobby, and with him was a sparkling-eyed, rosy-cheeked girl in a dark green coat with wide fur sleeves and a fur collar. She was only about five-and-a-half feet tall and was laughing, as also was Barry. They didn’t seem to know there was anybody in the world except each other. He was carrying a four-foot-long gun case with a luggage-type handle.

  I looked at Poetry in his chair, and the two of us stayed as low as we could under the fronds of the potted palm.

  Barry set down the gun case, and the two of them went outside again into the cold night.

  In a flash, Poetry and I were out of our tropical climate to see what was going on outside, if anything.

  What we saw wasn’t any of our business, but since it happened right in front of our astonished eyes, we almost had to see it.

  “What do you know about that?” Poetry exclaimed in a disappointed voice. “Poor Barry!”—the same thing he had said when we were still up in our room.

  For about a minute Barry and the girl stood at the door of a taxi, whose driver was waiting for her to get in. Then, all of a sudden, they gave each other a half-long kiss, as I’d accidentally seen Mom and Dad give each other quite a f
ew times back home. Barry helped her into the cab then, closed the door, and stood watching while the driver steered out into the night traffic and was gone.

  By the time Barry was back inside, Poetry and I were walking around the lobby, looking with let’s-pretend indifference at the pictures on the walls and at the many different kinds of candy bars at the hotel magazine stand.

  Barry’s voice behind us was certainly cheerful as he said, “You boys want a candy bar? Pick out your favorite. The treat’s on me.”

  “No, thank you,” Poetry said politely. “Candy at bedtime isn’t good for a boy my size.”

  Just then, from the stairway leading to the basement game room came the rest of the gang, and there wasn’t a one of them who thought a candy bar would be hard to digest before going to bed.

  A little later we were all up the elevator and into our rooms, where Barry asked us, “Want to see what I went after?” He opened the gun case and took out one of the prettiest rifles I ever saw.

  All our eyes lit up, Big Jim’s and Circus’s especially. “We may have to bring down a wolf, or maybe we can get a deer or two,” Barry explained.

  “Or a bear,” Little Jim said with a grin, maybe remembering that he himself had once killed a fierce old mother bear back at Sugar Creek.

  “This is what the phone call was about,” Barry explained, looking at me out of the corner of his eye, which made me look around out of the corner of my eye at the other members of the gang. He was probably remembering I had said quite a while ago, after I’d heard the lady’s musical voice on the phone—“His mother is maybe only twenty years old.”

  For a few seconds you could have heard a pine needle fall, everything was so extraquiet.

  “You see,” Barry added, “one of my classmates at college lives at Squaw Lake. She’s a grandniece of Mr. and Mrs. Wimbish. When her own mother and father died, they sort of adopted her. This gun was her Christmas present to me. She had to order it from the East, so it was a little late getting here. Isn’t it a beauty?”

  I thought, as Barry talked, that it was indeed the prettiest repeater rifle I ever saw, with its crowned muzzle and raised-ramp front sight and gleaming walnut stock. Just looking at it made me tingle with anticipation at what an exciting and maybe even dangerous time we were going to have on our vacation.

  My mind flew on ahead to the Snow Goose, so that I missed part of what Barry was telling us. I didn’t come to until I heard him saying, “… so that’s the way it is. Next June, just as soon as school is out up here, there’ll be a wedding at the Snow Goose. You boys’ll get to know her yourselves when she comes up the last of the week to bring the station wagon.”

  “The station wagon?” I exclaimed. “I thought we were going to ride up in it ourselves. I thought—”

  “We were to have,” Barry explained and started to untie his tie, getting ready to get ready for bed. “But I had to have the engine overhauled, and the mechanic ran into some serious trouble.

  “Jeanne is letting us drive her car. Two of you,” he added, as he slipped out of his shirt and I saw his powerful muscles like a nest of snakes under his tan skin, “two of you will have to ride the bus. There wouldn’t be room in the car for all of us, along with all this luggage.” He gestured around the room at our six different kinds of suitcases.

  There was some friendly excitement for a while, as different ones of us begged Barry to let us ride the bus to Squaw Lake.

  “It’ll have to be two of the biggest ones of you,” Barry decided.

  “Biggest tall or biggest around?” Poetry asked hopefully.

  That sort of settled it. Barry decided on Poetry for sure, and a little later, maybe because Poetry and I were such good friends, he picked me for the other one of the two.

  Early in the morning we were off—Poetry and I on the bus, and the rest of the gang with Barry as soon as they could get the car serviced. As we pulled out of the gas station and headed out through the snowplowed streets toward the open country and the wild, frozen North, I was wondering how much sooner we would get to Squaw Lake than they would.

  Poetry was wondering the same thing and said so. But he wasn’t worried the least bit about what we would do to pass the time while we waited for them. Something else was on his mind. “Poor Barry! He’s one of the finest woodsmen I know. He likes the out-of-doors, and nature studies, and camping out. What’ll he do, marrying a citified girl like that—you know—like that extrapretty, helpless-looking girl we saw back there in the hotel?”

  I sighed and looked out the window at the cars and trucks we were threading our way through, then back at Poetry’s face. “Yeah, poor Barry! Poor Sugar Creek Gang too! We’ll lose our camp director!”

  Neither of us said anything for a while. For a minute I felt pretty sad, but Poetry cheered me up by saying, “But both our fathers got married once, and it didn’t hurt them—not much, anyway.”

  Hearing that, my thoughts took a flying leap out across the sky to Sugar Creek, and I thought about what a fine person Theodore Collins was. Also I seemed to see him and Mom sitting at the breakfast table that very minute without me. They were pretty nice people. Both of them, I thought.

  Answering Poetry, I said, “Yeah, but my father married a good farm girl, who knew how to work and could bake pies and cakes and do all the other things a farmer’s wife has to do.”

  “My mother too,” Poetry said proudly. Then he shook his head once more and added, “But I’m afraid Barry’s got a girl who’ll have to be waited on, and who won’t want to camp out, and will be too dainty to rough it like he likes to do.”

  But we couldn’t worry our heads about it. We had a long ride and a wonderful winter vacation ahead of us: ice fishing, running the trapline with Barry and Ed Wimbish, the old-timer trapper who, with his wife, Martha, once owned the Snow Goose but had sold it to the Everards.

  Wildlife in the frozen North, that was what Barry was going up to study. How much wildlife would we see on our vacation? How wild would it be? And how savage? Was there an honest-to-goodness one-hundred-pound timber wolf hanging around the place, or was old Ed just an exaggerator as the Everards’ letter had said?

  We’d soon find out.

  2

  All the time our busload of people was roaring on into the North, I kept wondering how soon Barry’s car had been serviced and whether, after they got started, they could drive fast enough to catch up with us—or if they’d have any trouble on the way.

  Poetry asked me, as we ate a sandwich-and-milk lunch at a roadside cafe with all the other bus people, “What’ll we do if the gang gets stuck in a drift and we have to spend the night—the first night—in the Snow Goose all by ourselves?”

  Trying to be funny, I answered, “I don’t know what you’ll do, but I’ll spend my night sleeping.” My answer was smothered in a yawn. I certainly was drowsy, maybe from having had so little undisturbed sleep in the hotel last night.

  I’d never been waked up so many times in one night in my whole life. First it had been Dragonfly, snoring like a saw cutting a rick of wood. Then it was Poetry, who was in the big double bed with me, rolling over in his sleep and threshing around with his arms and accidentally shoving me out onto the floor, where I landed with enough noise to wake up the rest of the gang and get several pillows thrown at me. Then it was the traffic outside in the street and all the lights of the cars parading across the ceiling.

  Worst of all, though, it seemed there was something heavy in my stomach, as if maybe it hadn’t been a good thing to eat that candy bar just before going to bed.

  On the bus again and gone again, Poetry and I took a lazy nap apiece. In fact, we took several of them, making the time go faster.

  The farther we went, the higher the snowdrifts were on either side of the highway, and it seemed there were millions of pine and spruce and fir and leafless trees everywhere, forests and forests and forests of them. The snow in the bright sunlight made it look as if we were driving on a long white-gold ribbon that wound
round and round through a forest that didn’t have any end. It was easy to imagine that the trees had big, white, very heavy blankets thrown over them.

  I was dreaming out at the flying countryside, still half-sleepy, when Poetry spoke up and said, “Look! See that!”

  “See what?” I asked, not interested in seeing anything I had to open my eyes to look at.

  “That lake!”

  “What? Where?” That’s all I had been seeing for hours, except for trees and more trees. Each lake looked like a Sugar Creek pasture covered with snow—not any water in sight and no ice either.

  “Squaw Lake, I mean,” Poetry yawned an answer to my yawned question.

  I looked out the window and down the road through the bus’s wide windshield, and there wasn’t any sign of a lake.

  “Here,” Poetry explained, “on this map. It’s only forty miles farther. We’ll get there in less than an hour. The sun won’t be down. We can go fishing and have fish ready for supper by the time the gang gets there.”

  The last forty miles were gone in only a little while, it seemed, and all of a sudden there was a screeching of bus brakes and a voice singing out, “Squaw Lake!”

  We were off the bus, and it was gone in only a few minutes. Poetry and I were left standing in front of an oldish-looking store called “Wimbish Grocery.” The weather was certainly mild, and it didn’t feel nearly as cold as I thought it ought to be that far north.

  “Hey!” Poetry exclaimed, with astonishment in his voice, looking all around at the same time. “Where’s the town? Where’s Squaw Lake?”

  “Yeah! Where is it?” I asked, not seeing any.

  “Oh, there it is!” he grunted. “Up there on the sign above the word ‘Wimbish.’”

  I looked and read, “Squaw Lake Post Office.”

  We looked at each other, wondering, What on earth?

  “Where’s the rest of the town?” I asked Poetry.

  He looked all around, shading his eyes against the sun. “This is it. There isn’t any rest of it.”