Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 19-24

by Paul Hutchens

  Then he looked all around and grinned, gave our scarecrow a kick with his bare foot, and said, “Come on, let’s get him strung up!”

  When we reached the front gate by the walnut tree, Mom called to us, “You boys get your party over as soon as you can. Don’t forget the meeting tonight!”

  I’d almost forgotten there was to be a meeting of the Sugar Creek Literary Society that very night. A famous chalk artist was going to draw colored pictures for everybody.

  In a few minutes we had passed through our front gate, crossed the gravel road, and were on our way through the woods to the place where Dragonfly’s imaginary playmate was really to come to an end.

  Snatzerpazooka’s mop wig covered not only his imaginary cutoff ear but his eyes as well. He looked as if he could scare the appetite out of any crow that got close enough to see him. Riding high on the four-hand seat between Big Jim and Circus, it seemed he was an actual honest-to-goodness horse thief.

  It was a wonderful day, with the fragrance of wildflowers everywhere, warm sunshine spraying itself over the trees and bushes and the grass. It certainly felt fine to be alive.

  All of a sudden I turned myself into a marshal of the Old West. With six-guns in their holsters at my belt and my rope on the pommel of my saddle, I galloped down the path on a beautiful all-white stallion.

  I was hoping something very important, and that was that Little Jim’s folks would not only take Dragonfly with them when they went to the Aspen Music Festival in Colorado, but that the rest of the gang would get to go too—me, especially.

  Behind me, I could hear other fast-running steps. I took a glance over my shoulder, and it was Poetry, puffing hard, trying to keep up with my galloping horse. There was a sad expression on his face, though, and I guessed he was still heavyhearted on account of lightning having killed his wonderful pony, beautiful black and white and yellow Thunderball.

  Behind Poetry was spindle-legged Dragonfly with Little Jim at his heels and, last of all, Snatzerpazooka on a handmade saddle between Circus and Big Jim.

  We were six boys on our way to have a lot of brand-new fun playing a game we’d never before played. Also we were going to do a good deed by stringing up a scarecrow to save Dragonfly’s cornfield from the crows.

  Racing in and out between and behind and in front of us, was droopy-faced, flopping-eared, long-tongued Redskin, who maybe had saved my life only a day or so ago by trailing me to the hollow sycamore by the cave where the first Snatzerpazooka was supposed to have been buried and where I’d dug a hole to bury the ornery part of Bill Collins.

  Panting and running and making a lot of boy noise, we reached the spring, crawled through the board fence, and went on the path to the swimming hole, where our boat was moored and near which was the river birch.

  “As soon’s we get our party over,” Little Jim exclaimed cheerfully, “we’ll go in swimming and won’t have to take any bath tonight.”

  The idea made me sad but also cheered me up a little. If there was anything I didn’t like it was to take a bath before changing clothes to go anywhere.

  In another minute the pretend necktie party would be on. The necktie party—and something else. I didn’t know then that right in the middle of it we’d hear the shotgun shot you already know about, the one that scared us half to smithereens.

  6

  No sooner had we reached the swimming hole and the river birch, where we were going to string up our scarecrow, than we had to decide who was going to be the stolen horse.

  The first thing I noticed was that there were four or five crows out in the cornfield having early supper. We quick plopped Snatzerpazooka down on the grass between the field and the swimming hole. Each of us grabbed up rocks and clods of dirt and yelled, “Scarecrow! Scarecrow! Scarecrow!” hurling our missiles out across the field at the black thieves.

  I noticed, though, that Dragonfly was yelling a different word than the rest of us. He was screaming with a grin on his face, “Snatzerpazooka! Snatzerpazooka! Snatzerpazooka!”

  The crows must have thought we meant business. They came to life as fast as crows can, then lifted themselves on their lazy black wings, and flapped their awkward way across the field toward the bayou and the woods beyond.

  “You’ve got to be the stolen horse again!” Dragonfly said to me excitedly.

  Quickly Big Jim had my lasso, which was a piece of Mom’s new clothesline—there had been about ten feet too much when Dad strung it between the two posts standing between the house yard and the barnyard. Up the tree Circus went at Big Jim’s orders. In no time one end of the rope was tied around the river birch branch, and about seven feet of the rest of the rope was dangling.

  Big Jim himself was an expert at tying all kinds of knots. He made a bowline knot with a loop, which he put around Snatzerpazooka’s stuffed flour-sack neck, while I, the stolen, freckle-faced horse, stood under the branch with Snatzerpazooka’s stuffed legs across my shoulders.

  “OK, men, get your guns ready!” Big Jim ordered. “The very minute his horse gets out from under him, everybody start running as fast as you can toward the spring, shooting back like they used to do in the Old West!”

  In another tense minute, the stolen horse would shoot out from under the thief, which right that minute was astride my shoulders, and he would be left hanging and would never again be Dragonfly’s imaginary playmate but would be a scarecrow instead.

  We had to wait another half minute or two, though, because Dragonfly all of a sudden cried out, “Wait! Don’t start yet!”

  I stood there while he stepped back with his wooden gun in his hand and with a set face looked up at the thief. He said, “Good-bye forever! You used to be a good boy, but you turned out to be ornery, making me sneeze and sneeze and sneeze and sneeze! You’re going to be a scarecrow from now on. I’m a magician, see?”

  With that remark, Dragonfly walked toward me, keeping his eyes glued to Snatzerpazooka’s head just above mine, holding his handmade wooden rifle like a magician holding a wand. He waved it a few times, then stepped back and stared and with a surly voice exclaimed, “OK, men! He’s ready.”

  “OK, gang,” Big Jim ordered. “Ready?”

  “Ready!” most of us echoed.

  “Don’t start shooting,” he ordered, “until Bill’s out from under him!”

  The second I—the horse—was free from my load, I quick changed myself from a stolen horse into a cowboy and was on my beautiful, white, imaginary stallion, galloping down the path toward the spring. All of us were yelling, “Bang … bang … bang … bangety-bang-bang-bang!”

  And that is when we heard, right in the midst of our yelling, the explosion of an actual gun, which I told you about in the first chapter of this story. It was a very loud, startling explosion from somewhere or other behind us.

  That is when we’d all stood and stared, and Dragonfly had looked back and stammered, “L–l–look! Snatzerpazooka’s down! His rope’s broke!”

  We argued for a minute as to whether the rope had really broken or whether the noose had slipped off his neck.

  Then, after what seemed quite a long while of wondering what on earth, we crept back toward the river birch. My heart was pounding with honest-to-goodness fear. There wasn’t anything make-believe about the way I felt.

  In only about three minutes after we’d started back, we reached the base of the tree. Snatzerpazooka was sprawled on the ground, his head leaning against the curled bark of the trunk, his crayon-made eyes looking pretty spooky.

  Above him was the frayed end of the rope that had been hanging him. Big Jim’s noose was still around the ridiculous neck, with about a foot of rope still on it.

  Sawdust was scattered all over, and there were holes in Snatzerpazooka’s face as if somebody had driven in a dozen nails and then had pulled them out again. On one side of his head, where the cutoff ear was, there was a large torn place.

  Little Jim cried out then, saying, “Look! Here’s his wig—way over here!”

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sp; He stooped, picked up the mop we’d sewed on with a darning needle, and held it up for us to see.

  What, I thought, on earth!

  It was as plain as Dragonfly’s crooked nose what had happened. That is, part of what had happened was plain. The rest of the excitement didn’t get explained till later.

  Big Jim came up with the first idea when he frowned, in order to look like a detective is supposed to look, and said, “While we were here, tying the noose and getting ready to string up our scarecrow, somebody was hiding nearby, spying on us.”

  “As soon as Snatzerpazooka was up and hanging and we were running and yelling, ‘Bang—bang—bangety bang!’ shooting our toy guns, the spy shot him with a real gun—a shotgun. See here? Some of the pellets struck him in the face, and some struck the rope, cutting it in two.”

  Circus, who knew a lot about guns, broke in with, “Whoever shot him had to be pretty close to him or the pellets would have been too scattered for enough of them to have blown a hole in the side of his face and knocked his wig off and cut the rope.”

  I felt my temper starting to catch fire at anybody who would do such a thing to our horse-thief scarecrow.

  We looked at each other’s surprised and half-scared faces, wondering what to do, when all of a sudden, there was another shot. I saw a puff of smoke over across the cornfield near the bayou. A few seconds later, I heard a crow let out a scared squawk. I also saw at the edge of the field over there a black-winged bird flopping along on the ground kind of the way a chicken acts when its head has just been chopped off and it’s out in the backyard dying.

  Then I saw something else. A boy about my size, wearing blue jeans and a striped T-shirt, shot from behind a low shrub, scooted in a half crouch out into the field, chased the crippled crow until he caught it, and stuffed it into the gunnysack he was carrying. In a second, almost, he was back behind the shrubbery that bordered the bayou.

  “It’s Little Tom Till!” several of us exclaimed.

  “He’s shooting crows for bounty, I’ll bet,” Poetry offered. “It was in the paper this morning. They’re paying ten cents for every crow that’s killed this month.”

  Dragonfly let out a hot-tempered explosion, crying, “Ten cents! Why, that little thief! That’s my crow! He shot it in our cornfield!” Before any of us could have stopped him, that little rascal of a spindle-legged boy was like a barefoot arrow, skimming out across the field toward the place where we’d last seen Tom and his gunnysack with the crow in it.

  It made me cringe to watch Dragonfly Roy Gilbert racing as if he was mad enough to bite a ten-penny nail in two, straight toward the place where a few seconds ago I’d seen Tom Till.

  I’d seen Dragonfly in quite a few fights, and he was a fierce fighter. Also, I’d not only seen Tom Till in the middle of several fistfights but had been in one with him. In fact, my nose had been on the other end of one of the hardest-knuckled fists a boy ever felt.

  That fight was the nose-bashing Battle of Bumblebee Hill in the story Killer Bear. Tom was a fierce fighter, but Dragonfly was heavier, had a hotter temper, and he’d soon make short work of the little guy, I thought. I felt my forehead getting as wrinkled as old Redskin’s, who, like greased red lightning, was loping in long leaps after his master.

  “We’d better go stop the fight before it starts!” I cried excitedly to the rest. I leaped on my white horse to race after Redskin and his crooked-nosed owner. I felt almost as if I was running headfirst into some kind of battle myself, like a Western marshal on the way to save a friend from getting killed or maybe to stop two friends from hurting each other.

  As I galloped across that neck of land to the bushes that bordered the bayou, I saw myself the hero of a real-life cowboy story, flying like mad on my white horse with the rest of the gang on their own horses following me. Dust was rising from our horses’ galloping hooves, and we were making short work of the distance between us and the scene of whatever trouble we’d find when we got there.

  My hair was long and beautiful, streaming down on my shoulders, because I was Wild Bill Hickok himself, the famous marshal and gun-fighter. In its holster at my right side was my notched six-shooter, which had turned itself from a wooden gun made out of an old shingle into a colt revolver with six honest-to-goodness cartridges.

  I got to the grassy border in only a few seconds. Poetry got there right behind me before any of the rest. We heard a savage voice I certainly didn’t expect, and for a moment I didn’t recognize whose it was. That same voice barked, “Stop where you are! Don’t move. Get your hands up!”

  “Shorty Long!” Poetry cried beside me.

  And it was. Shorty Long, the only boy I ever saw who was as heavy as Poetry and who was as hard to get along with as any bully anybody ever saw or heard.

  It was what else I saw that made me cringe. Standing not more than five feet from the edge of the bayou was little Tom Till, holding the gunnysack with the crippled crow in it. Tom held the bag shut with both hands. Beside him, both his small hands above his head and looking like a scared rabbit afraid to move, was Dragonfly.

  Behind a fallen log, standing with one foot on it and with a double-barreled shotgun held as if he would use it if he had to or wanted to, was mean-faced, set-jawed, glinting-eyed Guenther Shorty Long, the boy I’d licked a few times in fights, and the life of whose blue cow I’d saved one summer.

  A second later there were three more boys beside and behind me, all of us getting stopped stock-still by Shorty Long’s fierce face and shotgun. The gun wasn’t pointed at us but was held ready to point if Shorty would have been dumb enough to actually do such a dangerous thing.

  All of a sudden from beside me there came one of the sauciest voices I ever heard, kind of high-pitched and trembling but crying, “You great big coward! Holding a gun on us! You drop that and fight like a man!”

  It was Little Jim, the littlest one of us and, as I’ve already told you, the best Christian of us all.

  I don’t know what was in that little mouse-faced boy’s mind, but when I saw the look in his eyes, I knew he was in his own little world of imagination. He had maybe seen or read a story somewhere in which the hero hadn’t been afraid of the villain’s gun in spite of its being pointed at him.

  Before anyone could stop him, Little Jim Foote, with his eyes glinting back at Shorty Long, started on a slow, stiff-legged walk—his elbows out, his fists doubled up, his smooth little jaw set, his lips pursed—straight toward the big boy standing behind the fallen log.

  “You’re a coward!” Little Jim said again and gritted his teeth.

  What he said and the way he said it did something to Dragonfly, the next-to-the-littlest one of us. While Shorty Long’s eyes were focused on Little Jim walking toward him, Dragonfly lowered his arms, doubled up his own fists, and shouted, “You great big bully! You’re afraid to drop your gun!”

  I saw red anger flash into Shorty Long’s eyes, saw his finger on the trigger of the shotgun twitch, and I knew it would be as easy as anything for him to get excited and that one of us might get killed.

  There we all were with our toy guns—some plastic, some handmade out of wood, some of tin or other metal—and standing before us in a mad mood was a boy who didn’t like us anyway, and he had a real gun!

  My own temper was telling me to put my muscles to work, to watch my chance, to make a flying leap toward the mean-faced boy, seize his double-barreled shotgun, thrust it aside, and land a few fierce, fast furious fists on his broad face. For a second, in my mind’s eye I had already done it. I had made short work of Shorty Long. But it was only in my mind’s eye. I had better sense than to risk my life in such a foolish move.

  Big Jim took over then. He said, “We’re not going to be fool enough to jump you! And we know you wouldn’t be a bigger fool and pull that trigger! But we’d like to know something!”

  All this time little Tom Till was holding the gunnysack with the crippled crow in it, struggling as a chicken in a gunnysack does, trying to get out.
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  Shorty Long’s sarcastic voice answered Big Jim, saying, “Oh, so you admit you’re all a bunch of ignoramuses and you don’t know a thing.”

  That tightened Big Jim’s muscles and his fists and put fire in his eye. I thought for a second he was going to fly into the kind of action I’d seen him fly into before when there was a boy who needed a licking. But he didn’t. Instead, he spoke with hot but controlled words. “We want to know who shot down our scarecrow. Did you do it?”

  A saucy smirk spread across Shorty Long’s face as he answered, “I am like George Washington. I cannot tell a lie. I did it with my little double-barreled shotgun! You boys were hurting our business. Tom Till and I are partners in a new business venture. I shoot the crows; he is my retriever. He goes out and gets them for me, and I give him three cents out of every ten-cent bounty we get.

  “We got six crows yesterday, and we aren’t going to stand for any gang of boys putting up a scarecrow to scare our crows away.”

  Then Shorty Long’s hands tensed on his gun, a hard look came into his eyes, and he barked, “You can all get yourselves out of here—and fast. Now git!” He waved the long, double-barreled gun threateningly.

  I caught little Tom’s eye then, and he was sending some kind of message to me, trying to say something. His lips moved, and he gave me several secret signs, which I couldn’t read.

  It looked as if, even if he was a partner of Shorty Long, he wasn’t glad of it and was on our side.

  Dragonfly’s saucy little scared voice, with tears in it, said then, “If you shot the crows in my father’s cornfield, they belong to me!”

  And Little Jim piped up with a Bible verse out of the Ten Commandments, “You shall not steal!”

  We weren’t getting anywhere, but it was better shooting at each other with words than with bullets.

  “I said,” Shorty Long thundered, “I said, get yourselves out of here!” and he took a menacing step over the log in our direction.