Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 19-24

by Paul Hutchens

  Grunt and whittle and worry and whittle and … and then the knife slipped in my hand and out of my hand. And fell.

  Had it fallen outside or inside? I wondered.

  I worked my head out and looked down, but in the darkness I couldn’t see the ground well enough to tell whether the knife was there. Even if it was there, I couldn’t get it, I thought sadly.

  Maybe it had fallen inside. If it had, I would just stoop down and—but I couldn’t stoop. I couldn’t bend my knees, and I couldn’t reach down far enough to pick up anything off the floor of my narrow prison!

  If I could get my shoe and sock off, I could maybe pick up the knife with my bare toes and bend my knee far enough to get the knife up to where I could reach down and get hold of it.

  But how do you get your shoe untied and off when you can’t reach it? How do—

  My mind’s questions were interrupted then by the sound of a twig snapping somewhere behind the tree. There was also the fast crunch-crunch-crunch of leaves being walked on by somebody or something! My heart leaped into my mouth.

  Something! A tornado of shivers whammed into me and sent my head spinning. That was why the pickerel frogs had stopped their snoring and the bullfrogs their bellowing and the night herons their quoking! There was a wild animal of some kind snooping around!

  I could see its shadow now, long, with four legs and a long tail, and it was snuffling at the ground all around where I had been walking.

  I cringed and pressed myself back into my shelter as far as I could and stared into the darkness at the animal that was circling and snuffling at my trail. In another minute, it would be at the tree where I was—a hollow tree with an opening that was too small for me to get out of but plenty large for a wild animal’s head to get in!

  I gritted my teeth and stood cramped, trembling, and terrified.

  Now whatever it was began to move quickly in a circle toward the shadows of the cave, where I’d gone before coming back to Snatzerpazooka’s grave.

  I was so scared and mixed up in my mind that I hardly knew what was going on. I was even more mixed up a second later when a flash of light came from somewhere like a star falling or a meteor streaking across the sky. It shone all around in a wide circle, then it focused on the dark mouth of the cave, lighting up the gray rock wall at the back of the entrance room. And lighting up something else.

  I saw for a fleeting second two fiery eyes like coals from a stove, and the hairy face of a large animal of some kind. Then all was dark—the darkest dark you ever saw or felt.

  5

  Now what do you do at a time like that? What can you do?

  Those burning eyes might be the savage eyes of a wildcat—even if there weren’t supposed to be any in this part of the country. There had been a bear, once when there weren’t supposed to be any—a fierce, mad old mother bear, which we’d killed ourselves. But you maybe know all about that if you’ve read the story called Killer Bear.

  I kept on standing and cringing and staring and wondering. Almost right away there was the crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch of dry leaves again, as something or other came bounding out of the cave into the shadowy moonlight and began circling with its nose to the ground again all around where I had been moseying in the afternoon.

  Now it was where I’d dug the cat-sized grave. I could hear it sniffling the way Circus’s dad’s hounds do when they’re on the trail of a coon or some other animal.

  At the place where the two Snatzerpazookas were buried, the animal began to whine and act in a hurry and dig as if it was very excited. Dig … dig … dig … dig … making the dirt fly. Some of the particles struck against the tree I was in, and one actually hit me in the face.

  That’s when a bright beam from a flashlight landed on the grave, and in its yellowish circle I saw a reddish-brown dog. The dog quickly turned to look back, and I saw a long drooping head and floppy ears. It was old Redskin, Dragonfly’s bloodhound.

  A split second later Dragonfly’s own excited voice shouted, “Get away from there! That’s Snatzerpazooka’s grave. Stop that digging!”

  Redskin stopped digging, sniffed the air, and quicker than anything was where I was, standing on his hind feet, his front paws on the trunk of the sycamore, whimpering. Then, as “still” trailers do when they’ve finally treed their quarry, he let out a long-toned, wailing bawl, followed by a half-dozen sharp, quick chops, as much as to say, “I’ve treed him! Here he is! Come and get him!”

  And that’s when I let out a yell that scared the daylights out of Dragonfly.

  In only a little while I was out. It hadn’t taken Dragonfly more than half a minute to find my knife. Also, he was carrying with him his Scout hatchet, as he did nearly every time he was out in the woods with the Gang, especially when we were hunting at night with Circus.

  Dragonfly was a little disappointed because Redskin, who now was a grown-up dog with an even sadder, droopier face than ever, had trailed a boy instead of a wild animal.

  But Redskin was happier than Charlotte Ann on Christmas morning. He leaped and played around me, trying to make his master realize what an important thing he had done.

  Dragonfly used a surly voice on his dog playmate, saying, “Can’t you ever learn to trail a coon or a possum or a fox? I can’t make any money catching boys! They’re not worth anything!” Imagine that. Imagine it!

  “I thought all the time he was on a hot coon trail,” Dragonfly complained.

  As soon as he knew I had to get home quick to stop my mother from worrying, we were both on our way, following in the path made by his bobbing flashlight. “Where’d he pick up my trail?” I asked.

  “Down by the sugar tree where Thunderball was killed,” he said. “He’d been following along behind me. Wouldn’t even try to smell anything till we got there.”

  I remembered then. That was where I’d left our orchard, had climbed the fence, and stood for a while looking down with my mind’s eye at seven dead horses—and one beautiful black and white and yellow pony. There also, I had thought about the tall cottonwood towering above Shorty Long’s tent.

  Crunch … crunch … crunchety-crunch-crunch-crunch. Our four human feet and four bloodhound feet scrunched along through the night toward the mouth of the branch on our way to stop two mothers from worrying.

  It’d have been worse if our two fathers had been home, I thought, and said so.

  Dragonfly sighed and answered, “I sure hope they bring back from the farmers’ convention a few ideas about how to keep crows out of a cornfield. I’ll bet there were a dozen big black ones down in our bottom field gobbling the new corn sprouts this afternoon. I tried to get old Redskin to help chase them away, but he wouldn’t. He’s as dumb as Snatzerpazooka used to be.”

  That got us to talking about scarecrows being a good way to keep crows away, and before we reached our different homes, we had decided to call a gang meeting the very next day to make a scarecrow to string up along the creek at the edge of Dragonfly’s father’s cornfield. One of the branches of the river birch not far from the swimming hole would be the best place.

  It was fun making the most ridiculous-looking scarecrow our six minds could design. We made the head out of a small flour sack, first stuffing the sack with sawdust, then using crayons to draw his eyes, a nose, and a mouth.

  “He’s got to have long hair!” Dragonfly emphasized. His voice was very bossy for a little guy.

  “Why?” Circus asked. “We don’t have any hair for him.”

  “Because,” Dragonfly whined, “because he’s a horse thief, and he has to wear long hair to cover up the place where the top of his ear has been cut off.”

  It sounded ridiculous, and most of us said so.

  “I read it in a book,” Dragonfly explained. “In the Old West, whenever a man stole a horse and the cowboys decided not to hang him for it, like they did most horse thieves, they’d just cut off the top of one of his ears and turn him loose.”

  Poetry, who had also read a lot about the Old
West, broke in then and added, “He’s right. Anybody with the top of his ear cut off for being a horse thief wouldn’t want anybody to know it, so he would let his hair grow long enough to cover the cutoff tip.”

  From what Dragonfly and Poetry had just said, our plan sort of grew by itself, and before the scarecrow was half finished, we had decided to play what Dragonfly and Poetry had also read about in different books, a game called a “Cowboys’ Necktie Party.”

  The way it was done in real Old West life was that whenever a horse thief was going to be lynched, they’d lead him on his horse up under the overhanging branch of a tree, tie one end of the rope around the thief’s neck, and the other end around the overhanging branch. Then they’d drive his horse out from under him and leave him dangling by his neck. The cowboys who had just hanged him would race away on their own horses, discharging their guns back in the direction of the just-hanged horse thief.

  Little Jim thought of something that for a minute almost spoiled our fun. He said, “Didn’t they have a trial first, like they do in America, and prove he was guilty before they hanged him?”

  I looked at the innocent face of the littlest member of the gang, who was the best Christian of us all. I noticed his fists were doubled up as if he was ready for a fight, as if he’d be on the side of the horse thief and would defend him if he could. I remembered then that his father was the township trustee and that he had an uncle in the city who was a judge.

  Poetry let out a snort at Little Jim’s question, saying, “The Old West was America. Part of it, anyway!”

  Big Jim knew a little history, himself, and quite a little about the Old West, so he answered both Poetry and Little Jim. “It was an unwritten law in the Old West that a horse thief had to hang. But sometimes the mob spirit got into a group of cowboys, and they didn’t bother to have a trial first. It wasn’t right, but they did it anyway.”

  Big Jim called a meeting, then, and said, “We’ll try this old scarecrow right now. Little Jim, you be the judge.”

  It wasn’t much of a trial and didn’t last long. Poetry was the defense lawyer. He argued that the poor old scarecrow hadn’t done anything wrong to deserve to be hanged. He made quite a speech in his squawky, ducklike voice. We’d all seen a mock trial the year before at a meeting of the Sugar Creek Literary Society, which meets once a month in the school across from the church.

  I felt proud of Poetry. He stood under the spreading branches of the Jonathan apple tree in our orchard, where we were having our trial, and with a dignified face—for a while, anyway—said to Little Jim, “Your Honor, it’s the crows that are guilty of stealing corn, not this poor old innocent scarecrow, who never did a wrong thing in his life.”

  Dragonfly was what in trials is called a prosecuting attorney. “This is the second horse he has stolen,” he said, scowling. “When he stole his first one, we just cut off his ear as a warning. But now he’s got to hang! Look at his long hair! You know why he has long hair. He wants his cutoff ear covered up, that’s why!”

  And that is when we found out what was going on way back in the little guy’s mind behind his mussed-up face. He said, “Snatzerpazooka’s got to hang!”

  The trial was interrupted then by the judge and the jury and all of us crying out, “Snatzerpazooka? He’s already dead and buried, and we’ve burned his grave marker!”

  With that exclamation from everybody in our imaginary courtroom, Dragonfly seemed to forget he was a lawyer. He gave us all a surly scowl, quick stooped, picked up a stone from the ground and hurled it toward the road. My eye followed it as it sailed all the way across and into the woods, landing with a ker-plop against the black bark of the wild cherry tree that overhangs the road itself.

  “That,” Dragonfly scoffed, “was when I was little! I just pretended he was dead. I just pretended I buried him down by the sycamore tree. But this time, we’ll really hang him. Snatzerpazooka’s got to really die!”

  And that was that. The trial broke up, and we went on with the necktie party.

  Mom let us have an old mop she didn’t want anymore, so our horse thief could have long hair to cover his cutoff ear. It had been one of her favorite mops when it was new. It had also been one of my favorites. Many a time I had used it to scrub the kitchen floor when I should have been down along the creek with the gang. But a boy can’t let his mother get by with doing all the housework herself all the time, when that same boy’s muscles need strengthening by pushing a mop.

  The scarecrow was finally finished, and we faced the problem of how to carry him. It was quite a way from our orchard all the way down through the woods and along the bayou and the creek to the swimming hole and the river birch by Dragonfly’s dad’s cornfield.

  “Put him on his horse,” Dragonfly said. “Make him ride the horse he stole. Here, Bill. You look the most like a horse.”

  I scowled and frowned down at the end of my freckled nose. It didn’t look any more like a horse’s nose than anything.

  To show the gang I could take a kind of ornery joke without getting angry, though, I picked up our stuffed dummy, set his stuffed-with-straw overall legs astride my shoulders and took off on a gallop toward the orchard gate, getting there first. I stopped to rest in the shade of the big cherry tree, whose blossoms had a million petals on them, some of which had already fallen and were like snow on the ground.

  In a month or so there would be ripe cherries on the tree, and it would be the robins that would need a scarecrow—except that robins don’t scare easily.

  I was puffing pretty hard, I noticed, so I complained about not wanting to be a stolen horse carrying a horse thief.

  We decided two could carry Snatzerpazooka better than one, so Big Jim and Circus made a four-hand seat, and pretty soon we were on the way to the iron pitcher pump where we would give our thief a last drink of water before his execution.

  At the southwest corner of the house, Poetry, in a mischievous mood, rushed over to our rain barrel and, looking in at the brownish water, started to yell one of my favorite poems:

  “You can’t holler down my rain barrel!

  You can’t climb my apple tree!

  I don’t want to play in your yard,

  If you won’t be good to me!”

  Then he let out a war whoop down into the half-empty barrel. It sounded so much like a ghost’s voice that it sent a shower of shivers all over me.

  Inside our house, Mom, hearing the unearthly, bloodcurdling scream, came rushing to the back screen door just in time to see Big Jim and Circus carrying our dummy on their four-hand seat between them. I could see by her worried face that she was not only wondering What on earth? but also Who?

  It took only a few words to explain what was going on and to get the worry off Mom’s face.

  I’d better tell you that the gang was always especially polite to Mom. Even I behaved better than usual when they were at our house. The reason wasn’t only because Mom nearly always had a piece of pie for us, either. It just seemed natural for a boy to behave himself when there was a lady around.

  She surprised us with a question. “Are you sure he is guilty?”

  “We had a trial.” Little Jim grinned up at her and added, “And I sentenced him to hang!”

  Mom came all the way outdoors in her blue-and-white-flowered apron, walked with hands on her hips down the board walk to where we all were at the well platform. She looked down at our horse thief, with his crayon-made nose and eyes and mouth and ears, at the mop wig, which we’d sewed on with a darning needle. She surprised us again by saying, “Buffalo Bill Cody wore long hair; and Wild Bill Hickok, the famous marshal, had shoulder-length hair. But generally speaking, for a cowboy to wear long hair was frowned upon. In the Old West, if any man called another a Long Hair, he was sometimes answered with a quick draw and the roar of a six-gun.”

  Little Jim looked up at Mom, astonished, and blurted out, “How’d you know that? Who told you?”

  I was thinking the same astonishing thing.

&nb
sp; Mom’s answer sounded sort of mysterious as she said, “Oh, I just overheard it on the phone this morning.”

  I knew what she meant when she said she’d “overheard” it. That meant that she had gone to the phone, maybe to call up somebody. She had lifted the receiver to listen to see if the line was busy, and it was, but she hadn’t hung up right away.

  “Who was talking to who?” I asked.

  And Mom quickly answered, “Who was talking to whom, you mean.”

  “Yeah,” Poetry said in his mischievous voice, “Bill wants to know who was who and whom was whom.”

  The twinkle in Mom’s eye showed that pretty soon, if we took a little more time to get Snatzerpazooka his last drink, she’d go to the kitchen where the pies were and come back with a piece for each of us, which she did.

  While Snatzerpazooka was resting against the post at the southeast corner of the grape arbor, his mop-covered flour-sack head twisted to one side, and while we were making short work of our six pieces of pie, Mom just stood on the board walk and smiled her favorite company smile. Then she said, “I suppose you’re still interested in knowing who was who and whom was whom?”

  Dragonfly sputtered an answer proudly. “I know who it was. It was my mother talking to Little Jim’s mother. What did she say? Did Mother say I could go?”

  That is when we really got the surprise of our lives. Mom answered little spindle-legged Dragonfly, saying, “Your mother said you could go.”

  “Go where?” different ones of us asked him, and he puffed up like a pigeon strutting around on the roof of our barn when he answered, “I’m going out West for the hay fever season. Out where the cowboys begin. I won’t have to sneeze or have asthma for a whole month.”

  Little Jim came in cheerfully then with, “My father’s taking Mother to the music festival at Aspen, Colorado, and Dragonfly’s going with us.”

  I heard a sniffling noise beside me and, looking quick, saw Dragonfly’s face starting to go into a tailspin. Then he took a deep, nervous breath, glanced toward the sun, shut his eyes, and let out a long blast on his sneeze horn, crying at the same time, “Snatzerpazooka!”