Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 19-24

by Paul Hutchens

  Big Jim, who was in front of the rest of us, stood without moving a muscle.

  Something happened then that sent us all into flying action, and in a split second things were really happening. I hadn’t noticed what Circus was doing and didn’t have any idea what else he was going to do until he had done it. But all of a sudden he wasn’t there, and then I heard him let out a half-dozen raspy-voiced caws that sounded like a crow cawing.

  Quick as a flash, Shorty Long swung his gun around, while his eyes circled the sky, his body turning at the same time.

  And that is when Big Jim jumped him. Big Jim’s muscles, made strong from working hard on the farm, wrested the gun from Shorty Long almost before you could have said, “Jack Robinson Crusoe.” I expected any minute, though, while the scuffling was going on, to hear a deafening explosion as the gun went off.

  Dragonfly, angry and excited, leaped into the scuffle as soon as he saw a chance to get in without getting hurt. He whammed Shorty Long’s stomach a few times but got stopped by Big Jim’s ordering him, “No fighting! Stop!”

  Dragonfly stopped, and Big Jim whirled out of the way of Shorty’s arms as they reached for the gun.

  “Hold him, boys, while I unload this!” Big Jim ordered.

  Afterward, I found out I was one of the first ones to get to Shorty. A sore place on my jaw was proof he had gotten to me also.

  In the midst of our scuffle, Shorty Long went down, with quite a few of us on top of him, not more than seven feet from the edge of the bayou pond.

  While we were holding him, Big Jim broke open the shotgun and drew out two shells, one from each barrel. Resting the gun on his left arm and holding the two shells in his right hand, Big Jim looked down at Shorty Long’s flushed face and said something every boy in the world ought to hear.

  “Never point a gun at anybody, loaded or not! Hundreds of people have been killed by guns that weren’t supposed to be loaded. If those guns had been pointed away from people when they discharged, lives would have been spared.”

  What Big Jim was saying had already been made a rule of the Gang. The only guns we ever pointed at each other were toy guns that couldn’t shoot. There wasn’t a one of us that would even think of using a real gun in our games. We wouldn’t be that dumb.

  Shorty Long was gritting his teeth at what he was having to hear. Then he startled us by saying, “I’ve got three other shells in my pants pocket. Bill, here, is lying on them. How about letting me up?”

  That, I tell you, scared me. What if while we were wrestling with our prisoner, something had caused those shells to explode! What if?

  It was as dangerous as playing with dynamite! I certainly stopped lying where I’d been lying and scrambled quickly onto my knees. But I kept on using both hands with all my might, keeping Shorty’s right arm pinned to the damp, dank-smelling ground. We were, in fact, lying in a patch of catnip, which, getting crushed like that, smelled like a boy’s breath when he is chewing peppermint gum.

  What to do now? was the question. It was a pretty bad situation. But in another moment it was worse. Right then we heard the voice of somebody calling, “Guenther! Where are you?”

  It was the worried, angry, thundery voice of Shorty Long’s father.

  I hardly had time to remember the first time that same father had come looking for his boy in the story The Blue Cow. We’d been in a scuffle with his son, and Shorty had yelled for help and—but that’s the other story.

  The fatherly, thundery, worried, angry voice wasn’t more than fifty yards from us somewhere up at the east end of the bayou.

  Just then Shorty let out a scream that socked me in the face and ear and almost deafened me. “Help … help … they’re killing me! H-e-l-p!”

  There was a sound of heavy feet running through the underbrush. Then the bushes parted, and Shorty’s two-hundred-pound, round-in-front father came into view. I noticed he was wearing the same sport shirt I’d seen him have on before—a bright gold color with bunches of purple grapes all over it. He was also wearing his small, sporty mustache, too small for his big face. And he was carrying a fierce-looking beech switch.

  Seeing him, Shorty started yelling again, “Help! Help! They’re killing me!”

  7

  Seeing his red-faced, struggling son wallowing in the catnip bed like a tied hog, with five boys holding him down, and Little Tom Till standing close by with his crippled crow, and Big Jim standing with a double-barreled shotgun only a few feet from us, Shorty Long’s father stopped and demanded, “What is going on here?”

  Several of us started to talk at the same time, saying things that couldn’t have made sense to anybody who didn’t know what we knew. Dragonfly’s smallish, excited voice started our explosion of words as he began, “He shot down our scarecrow, and he’s been shooting my father’s crows and stealing them and selling them, and they’re my crows!”

  Big Jim’s words, coming out at the same time, were “He held a loaded gun on us!”

  Poetry’s ducklike voice came out with, “He broke up our necktie party!”

  Little Jim chimed in excitedly, “It’s wrong to steal! The Bible says, ‘You shall not steal.’”

  I must have sounded as if I was trying to defend myself for having done something wrong when I grunted out, “I was lying on his pocket, but I got off because it’s dangerous to lie on three loaded shotgun shells!”

  What on earth made me say that? I wondered, and so also must have Shorty Long’s father. All our explanations must have seemed like five scarecrows talking at once.

  “Stop! All of you! Let my boy up this minute! Guenther, get up!”

  His voice was so sharp that I started to obey but got stopped by Big Jim ordering us, “Don’t move! Keep him down! I want to explain a few things!”

  And Big Jim did explain. In a fast, sharp-talking speech that made me proud of him, he said to Shorty Long’s father, “Your boy’s too young to be out carrying a shotgun and shooting it, and he ought to know better than to point it at human beings!”

  Just then our prisoner came to teeth-gritting life. He started to struggle fiercely, crying for help again and demanding, “Let me up! You—you—”

  “Not yet!” Big Jim ordered us. He stooped, shoved his hand into Shorty’s right pants pocket, took out three shells, then exclaimed with a grunt, saying, “They’ve already been shot!” Big Jim held out to Shorty Long’s astonished father the three empty shells and the two unshot ones. He handed him the gun also and said to us, “All right, boys, let him up.”

  It wasn’t easy for me to obey. It would have been easier to have landed a few fierce fast fists first. But I didn’t, for just before I took my weight off my prisoner’s arm, which I’d been keeping pinned to the ground, I caught a glimpse of Guenther Long’s father’s face, thundery with anger. I saw also the beech switch and realized that Shorty might not need any more punishment than he was going to get.

  Remembering that my own Snatzerpazooka was supposed to be dead and buried in a cat-sized grave by the sycamore tree, I made myself try to defend Shorty by saying to his father, “Maybe he didn’t know any better. Maybe if he’d been taught at home how to behave himself and not to carry a gun and point it at people—”

  That was as far as I got. I was interrupted by the very firm voice of the man in the golden shirt with the purple grapes on it, who roared, “You, young man! Leave our son’s training to his parents! Now get going—all of you!”

  And we got!

  First, though, I decided to try to win little Tom back to ourselves by saying, “Come on, Tom! Bring your crow and come with us!”

  But Shorty Long made a dive for Tom. He grabbed the gunnysack with the crow in it, yanked it away from him, and left a sad, freckle-faced little guy standing as though he didn’t have a friend in the world.

  Shorty and his father were growling something to each other as they stomped up the border of the bayou toward their home.

  Tom sniffled a little. He looked first after Shorty, then at
all of us in a kind of worried circle. And then, turning, he struck out across the cornfield toward where Snatzerpazooka was lying propped against the curled bark of the trunk of the river birch.

  In a flurry of flying feet I was off after Tom Till. I had to try again to win him back into the gang and away from Shorty Long. I also wanted to invite him to go with us to the Literary Society to hear the chalk artist. Tom was especially good in art in school and might be glad to go.

  Well, he was a fast runner and already had a head start.

  “Wait, Tom!” I yelled to him. “I want to ask you something!”

  But he didn’t wait. When he reached the river birch, he didn’t even bother to look down at Snatzerpazooka but swerved onto the path that led down to the spring.

  “Wait!” I yelled again. “I want to tell you something important!”

  I didn’t bother to stop to look at the scarecrow, either, but cut across the dust of the cornfield rising from Tom’s flying feet. Small particles of dirt hit me in the face as I followed.

  In a few seconds I had reached the path that twisted through the weeds and tall sedge, my heart pounding with excitement and with my plan to take Tom with us that night, if his folks would let him. It seemed that now I ought to try extrahard to be his friend.

  And that’s when I ran into something in the path. However, it wasn’t a thing. It was a human being as big as Big Jim. He sprang from behind the trunk of an oak tree, grabbed me around the waist and hurled me to the ground, where I struck my head on a root and for a second couldn’t see anything but stars.

  But I could hear everything: a crow cawing somewhere, a half-dozen robins scolding because we were on their territory, and a surly voice accusing me, “You let my little brother alone, do you understand!”

  It was the angry voice of Big Bob Till, Tom’s brother, the meanest boy in the whole neighborhood except for maybe Guenther Shorty Long, and the fiercest fighter except Big Jim.

  He stood glaring down at me, kicked at me with the toe of his heavy shoe, then ordered, “Get up and get back with your own gang!”

  Before I knew what I was doing, I’d reached out with both hands, grabbed Bob Till’s ankle, and was holding onto it for dear life, yelling as Shorty Long had done, “Help … help … help!” to the gang to come to the rescue.

  And the gang came. There was the pounding of ten galloping feet racing down the path toward me, and voices calling, answering my own frantic calls.

  Even as I struggled, holding on like a bulldog to Bob Till’s ankle and getting whammed in different places on my body by Bob’s fists, I saw the bushes part up the path and Big Jim burst through on the run, with the rest of the gang tumbling after.

  Bob saw them, too. With a mighty heave, he yanked his foot free, leaped over a pile of drift, and disappeared in the general direction of the creek. His flight made a very exciting sound as he crashed through the underbrush.

  The stars I’d been seeing were gone, but there was a throbbing in my head where it had struck the protruding tree root.

  I explained what had happened, and why, and for a few minutes we all stood looking at each other and talking everything over. Then Big Jim said, “Let’s go back and start where we left off. Let’s get the scarecrow up again.”

  I went kind of dazedly along with my throbbing head, thinking what a failure I had been and discouraged that I hadn’t done a very good job of ruling my spirit. I was as mad as I’d ever been in my life and was ready to plunge headfirst into the first fight that came along.

  A red-haired fiery-tempered boy with a spirit like mine would have to have help from somewhere if he was going to act like a Christian boy was supposed to.

  There wasn’t a one of the gang, not even Poetry, my closest pal, to whom I could explain how I felt inside and why.

  For a minute I felt tears getting mixed up with what I was seeing, and I must have let out a kind of groan, because Little Jim, who was right behind me as we hurried toward Snatzerpzooka at the base of the river birch, asked, “Does your head hurt pretty bad?”

  “My head?” I answered. “Not too bad!”

  It wasn’t my head. The pain was way down inside somewhere. In fact there was a great big ache in my chest just above my stomach. It wasn’t like any kind of pain a boy gets when he’s been hit in a fight or fallen down and bumped his knee or stubbed his toe. And it was all mixed with a sad feeling that weighed about a hundred pounds.

  Bob Till’s grabbing me and whamming me to the ground meant that he was home again from having been away a few months. Now we’d have more trouble, and it’d be harder than ever to get Tom to be one of us again.

  Well, in a few moments we would come out into the open and would be at the lynching place. I didn’t have any heart to go on with the necktie party. In fact, none of us probably felt like it. We would just string up our scarecrow and get on back home to get ready to go to the potluck dinner at the school and the Literary Society afterward. I was already hungry enough to eat a bear.

  Just then, up ahead of the rest of us, Dragonfly let out a yell. “He’s gone! Snatzerpazooka’s gone!”

  That sent the rest of us into a gallop toward the river birch—and not on imaginary horses, either.

  Dragonfly was right. There wasn’t any ridiculous-looking scarecrow with his missing wig and spattered face. There was only the tree, a mashed-down place in the grass where he had been, and sawdust scattered all around the base of the tree.

  What on earth!

  We looked all around under the bushes, knowing Snatzerpazooka couldn’t have moved himself.

  Then we learned something else when Dragonfly, who was searching the area down by the swimming hole, cried out excitedly, “Hey, gang. Come here! Our boat’s gone too. Somebody’s stolen our boat!”

  Snatzerpazooka was gone! The boat was gone. A scarecrow made out of old clothes stuffed with straw and sawdust, with a rope around his neck, half his face blown away with a shotgun blast, couldn’t have gotten to his feet and walked or run or flown away! Nor could a rowboat, which had been chained to the maple tree at the edge of the water, have unchained itself and rowed itself down the creek.

  “What,” I said, “on earth!”

  In a flurry of flying feet, the rest of us were where Dragonfly was, looking in every direction to see what we could see.

  “Listen to that!” Big Jim cried.

  I didn’t have to listen in order to hear it. It was a long, low rumbling like a wagon or a car crossing the board floor of the Sugar Creek bridge about a quarter of a mile down the creek. Many a time in the middle of the night, I’d been wakened by that noise. It was as much a part of our life at Sugar Creek as other familiar sounds such as the “Sha-a-a-a-ay” of a screech owl or the crowing of a midnight rooster.

  But Circus exclaimed, “Thunder! It’s going to rain!”

  We all looked around in different directions to see if we could see any big white cumulus clouds, looking like packs of wool, which is nearly always what you see in the late afternoon when a thunderstorm is coming up.

  Dragonfly’s mind was on his scarecrow, though, and on the missing boat. It was his dragonflylike eyes that spotted the boat first. “Look!” he cried, pointing downstream. “There it is, floating with its oars in it, away down in front of the spring!”

  Circus was quickly halfway up a sapling near the shore, shading his eyes and looking. He cried, “There’s somebody in it! There’s a man in it, lying down!”

  I could see our weathered old rowboat myself, away out in midstream. And lying in the bottom, with one arm hanging over the gunwale and dragging in the water, was the figure of a man.

  “It’s our scarecrow!” Little Jim cried. “He’s come to life and is having a lazy afternoon boat ride.”

  I happened to be looking at Dragonfly that second, and a startled expression came over his face.

  “That’s it!” he cried excitedly. “It’s Snatzerpazooka come to life again!”

  Then he started to yell what he was
saying. “In the Old West, if they lynched a man, and one of the bullets they shot back at him cut the rope, his life was saved. He never had to be hanged again!”

  Dragonfly was so superstitious, partly because his mother was that way, that it was sometimes hard to tell whether he was really believing something or just pretending.

  “Ridiculous!” Poetry scoffed. “Whoever untied our boat threw old Snatzerpazooka into it, shoved the boat off, and let it go.”

  “Bob Till!” I grunted and for some reason felt my head-throbbing and my temper coming to life.

  Right that second it thundered again, this time a louder, longer, closer rumble, and we knew it was going to rain for sure.

  But we couldn’t let our boat drift away. We’d have to get it and tie it up at the shore somewhere, or it’d float downstream to the island below the bridge. If, when it got to the island, it took the left channel around it, it would have a long half mile of marshy, swampy shoreline to follow, and we’d never be able to stop it. It might go on downstream for miles and with our shotgun-blasted scarecrow in it!

  Just then a cloud of dust was whipped up from the cornfield behind us, blowing across where we were, and a strong wind ruffled the surface of the water of our swimming hole. The leaves and branches in the trees all around and overhead began to rustle and toss, and it looked like an old-fashioned Sugar Creek storm was almost here.

  “We’ve got to get the boat tied up before the storm strikes!” Big Jim cried, and his cry was an order. He started on the run down the path toward the spring, with all of us trailing as fast as we could.

  The wind was in our favor. It was at our backs as we ran. It was also in the boat’s favor, for out in midstream, where there wasn’t anything to break the wind, the waves were pushing it along fast. And I mean fast. Almost as fast as it could have drifted in a spring flood. It was the first race I had ever had with a runaway boat. It was also a race to beat a storm.

  Back over his shoulder came another order from Big Jim. He called, “Don’t anybody stop at the spring for a drink! If we can get to the bridge before the boat does, maybe we can rush out onto the neck of sand there and, if it passes close, reach out and pull it in!”