Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 19-24

by Paul Hutchens

  Plop … plop … squish … squish … our twelve bare feet flew down the path. Plunging along its winding trail, dodging branches or ducking under them so that none flew back and hit the face of anybody that was behind us, we flew like Santa’s reindeer were supposed to have flown in the poem “The Night Before Christmas.”

  For a fleeting minute, my imagination changed me from a cowboy on a galloping white stallion into white-whiskered Santa Claus himself, sitting in a sleigh jammed with toys, sailing through the sky with sleigh bells ringing, “more rapid than eagles,” as the poem goes.

  A glad feeling welled up inside in spite of my still-aching head where I’d bumped it on the tree root, and I yelled toward the other racing gang members:

  “Now Dasher, now Dancer,

  Now Prancer, now Vixen!

  On, Comet! On, Cupid!

  On, Donner and Blitzen!

  “To the top of the porch,

  To the top of the wall,

  Now dash away, dash away,

  Dash away all!”

  Besides being Santa Claus in the sleigh, I was also riding a red-nosed reindeer, and it felt fine to be alive. It really was a wonderful day, even if it was going to storm almost any minute.

  Hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry!

  Circus, our acrobat, being the fastest runner as well as best in nearly all sports, was ahead of Big Jim now.

  Quick as anything, we were through or over the board fence by the spring, up the incline, past the leaning linden tree, and galloping down a path that bordered the top of the cliff above the creek.

  It looked as if we might make it to the bridge and down the embankment to the neck of land underneath just in time to reach out and stop the boat as it went by.

  Right then, a blinding flash of lightning blasted Santa Claus and his reindeer out of the sky and turned him into a scared boy who at the same time felt a drop of rain strike him in his face.

  Away up ahead, Circus called back to us, “It’s raining! We can make it to the bridge and get under it for shelter. Hurry!”

  And we hurried. Past the pawpaw bushes on our left, on to the rail fence at the north road, over the fence, across the road and down the embankment, under and in the dry just as the rain broke loose and started coming down in sheets.

  But would we be able to stop the boat? I wondered.

  8

  The rain was so blinding that the sky itself seemed almost black. We could hardly see anything.

  “There he comes!” Dragonfly cried in a whining voice. “Look at him lying there in the boat in the rain! He’s g–g–g–getting w–w–w–wet!”

  “Who cares!” Poetry squawked back. “He’d have been all wet hanging back there in the tree!”

  “But he’d have been dead and wouldn’t have known it,” Dragonfly whined. “He’s alive now!”

  What a nonsensical idea—that is, if Dragonfly really believed it and wasn’t just playing make-believe.

  “Stop being a make-believe!” Little Jim ordered Dragonfly. “That’s just an old scarecrow!”

  Through the sheets of rain I could see the boat being whipped along in the strong wind. It was coming fast down the creek, but it was going to miss by fifteen or twenty feet the little sandy beach we were on. In only a few minutes it would blow past. Then we wouldn’t have a chance to get to it at all. It’d go drifting on down to the island.

  Our acrobat came to life then. “I’ll get her!” he declared in an excited voice. “I’ll go out onto the bridge and drop down into her and row her in!”

  He whirled and, like Dasher or Prancer or Comet or Vixen, was to the top of the embankment, and I heard his bare feet on the boards of the bridge as he raced out to the middle.

  It was a bright idea, I thought. Both oars were in the boat. Snatzerpazooka was lying sprawled across one of them.

  From under the bridge, we could see Circus working his way down over the side directly above where soon the boat would be. He had timed it just right. In a second now, the boat would be under him. Then he’d let go and drop into it.

  It was as good as watching an acrobat at the Harvest Home Festival at Sugar Creek—except that I’d never seen one of them performing in a blinding rain, with thunder and lightning roaring around in the sky.

  “Drop! Let go now!” Big Jim’s voiced barked.

  And Circus dropped.

  That is, he dropped partway. But only partway!

  “His overalls suspenders are caught!” Little Jim cried.

  The boat with the dead or alive scarecrow in it went blowing on downstream. And away up above the mad water was Circus, hanging by his overalls, their suspenders hooked on the projecting edge of a wooden beam.

  But that was only for a few scared seconds. Fast as a firefly’s fleeting flash, Circus worked himself around, struggled to reach back and up to catch hold of the beam, and pulled his body up to where he could unhook himself. Quicker than quick, there was our acrobat flying through the air with the greatest of ease straight down in an awkward sprawl toward the creek.

  He landed all right, but not in the boat, which by that time was quite a few yards downstream.

  There was a splash, which we could hardly hear or see for the blinding rain, and Circus was not only in the water but under it! He was right up again, sputtering and spitting creek water, and swimming toward us.

  It was one of the most exciting minutes of my life. I stood cringing and yelling, along with all the other yelling voices beside, behind, and in front of me.

  You’d have thought Circus would have been as mad as a wet hen, but he wasn’t. Instead, he came crawling out of the water onto the shore, grinning like a friendly monkey and saying, “I won’t have to take a bath tonight, maybe.”

  But Dragonfly was beside himself. He let out a yell and started to race down the narrow path that follows the creek only a foot or so from its bank.

  Big Jim was after him at once and dragged him back into the shelter of the bridge. And that was that.

  The rain kept coming down by barrelfuls for some time. Our battered old boat with Snatzerpazooka in it kept on drifting downstream toward the island. There wasn’t any sense in any of us getting ourselves all wet trying to run ahead of it, in the hope it might drift near the shore so that we could stop it before it reached the island and went on downstream.

  Tomorrow, maybe, there’d be warm sunshine, and we could go down to the old sycamore tree at the mouth of the cave, take the path through the swamp, and look all along the creek there for the boat.

  “We’ll make a new scarecrow!” Big Jim consoled Dragonfly—or tried to—but the little guy seemed all confused in his mind. His answer was, “He’s getting sop-soaking-wet, and I never used to let him stay out in the rain.”

  Big Jim’s voice got surly then, as he said, “Look, Roy! There isn’t any real Snatzerpazooka anymore. He was just a make-believe playmate. Remember?”

  In the kind of shadowy dark of the bridge, Dragonfly gave Big Jim a vacant stare, quick looked away down the creek toward the boat, and let out a yell that was almost a bloodcurdling scream. “Look! It’s drifting across the creek!”

  His excitement was contagious, like chicken pox. I felt goose bumps all over me as I looked through the blinding sheets of rain blowing over the rough water.

  Had the wind changed? I wondered. Was it now blowing from our side of the creek and pushing the boat across as well as downstream?

  Dragonfly was right. The boat, which had been nearer our side when it passed under the bridge, now was on the other side of the middle and moving as fast toward the other shore as it was downstream. Faster, in fact.

  I didn’t even get a chance to think, What on earth?

  The boat swung around a little, and I saw a hand clutching the gunwale. For a moment, I also saw something in the water that looked like a head-sized rubber ball.

  I felt Dragonfly, beside me, clutching my arm with trembling hands. A second later he whispered, “It’s a ghost. Snatzerpazooka’s turned into a ghos
t! He’s turning the boat around. He-he-he-look!” He screamed. “He’s moving! He’s waving his arm! The one that’s been hanging over the edge!”

  I really felt goose bumps then, because I’d seen it with my own eyes. The stuffed-with-straw right arm of Snatzerpazooka Scarecrow Gilbert had moved! And not as if it had been accidentally unbalanced but straight up in the air. Then it dropped down inside.

  The boat began a faster drifting toward the other shore and almost disappeared behind an overhanging willow. Only the stern was visible, projecting about a foot beyond the end of the willow, with Snatzerpazooka’s ridiculous head resting on the seat.

  It was a tense minute, I tell you, and spooky.

  How, I wondered, had the boat managed to drift across the creek? And how could it have steered itself, prow first, to the very place where, quite often, we ourselves tied it to a small maple at the water’s edge? How?

  Somebody had to do the steering. And somebody had to make it go faster than the wind and the current could have done it!

  Right that second there was a blinding flash of lightning and a deafening crash of thunder at the same time, lighting up everything all around us and the area about the boat and the overhanging willow. At the same instant, I saw the lightning bolt, like a white-hot ball of fire, roar out of the sky and streak toward the old cottonwood tree over there. There was the sound of splitting wood, and, in the second before the lightning’s light was gone, I saw a new white gash in the tree’s trunk from a place about thirty feet up all the way to the ground.

  I was scared for two reasons; first, because lightning so close with thunder that loud would scare anybody; and second, because I’d seen something else over there besides the boat with the scarecrow in it. I’d seen a human being clambering up the low embankment from the water’s edge and hurrying toward the tree.

  My mind’s eye was seeing things, too: seven horses lying sprawled on each other under a lightning-struck sugar tree. And away over by itself, as dead as the seven other horses, lay a beautiful yellow and black and white pinto pony.

  Now I knew for sure that there had been somebody swimming in the water, his body under and his head hidden behind the boat. He had been guiding the boat, pulling it along, making it go where he wanted it to. And I thought I knew who it was. The ball I’d thought I saw had been the red-haired head of Little Tom Till! It had to be Tom!

  And then I could picture him over there, not more than fifteen feet from the shore, lying dead under the cottonwood tree.

  I let out a nerve-tingling scream and yelled, “It’s Tom Till! He’s been killed by lightning!”

  I shot headfirst out of our shelter under the bridge and scooted up the embankment into the driving rain, feeling it beating against my bare head and into my face.

  I forgot about riding a big white stallion as my bare feet carried me across the board bridge to the other side. It was one of the wildest runs I’d ever made. I was hardly able to see because of the rain in my face.

  “Tom! Tom! Tom!” I kept sobbing. “Little Tom Till!”

  It seemed there wasn’t anybody in the world I liked better right then. A lot of things about Tom went through my mind from the time I’d first met him in the Battle of Bumblebee Hill to the different experiences we’d had with him that very afternoon. I remembered his darting from behind the bushes at the bayou, gunnysack in hand, chasing the crippled crow. I saw the worried look in his eyes and his very scared look when he had started on that race to keep me from getting him.

  I remembered the time I’d taken the cake over for his mother’s birthday and I had yelled savagely at him, “The very next time I catch you alone somewhere without Shorty or your brother along, I’m going to whale the living daylights out of you!”

  I’d said that to a boy who was one of my best friends! I’d said it to him and meant it!

  And now, if Tom was dead, I’d never get a chance to be his friend again!

  Run … run … pant … pant … the rain in my face, my bare feet pounding the board floor of the bridge … the thunder rumbling around in the sky … the wind whamming into me … and a tornado in my mind!

  Across the bridge at last, down the embankment there, stumbling along the same path I’d run on that other time when I’d ruled my spirit enough to put out the brushfire with my red-and-green plaid shirt.

  I had on that same red-and-green shirt right now, I thought.

  Maybe Tom would still be alive when I got to him. He would not want to die, and maybe he would stagger away from the tree a little, the way Thunderball had done before he’d had to give up.

  Now I was where the boat had put in to the shore. Now I was at the cottonwood, but I could hardly see the long, ugly, white gash on it. In spite of the rain, I could see well enough that Tom himself wasn’t there anywhere.

  Maybe he’d managed to get quite a few feet away. Maybe …

  I worked myself around through the bushes, then stumbled over something and took a headfirst spill. I landed right in front of something dark and shaped like a triangle at the top. I couldn’t stop myself from rolling and came to inside a low canvas room.

  I had stumbled over Shorty and Tom’s tent rope a few inches from where it was tied to a stake in the ground, had fallen headlong, rolled toward the canvas door, and struck it hard enough to force it open.

  The black sky outside made it so dark inside that I could hardly see the cot against one wall. Directly across from it was another cot the same size, with something lying on it, not moving.

  The rain on the canvas roof was so deafening I could hardly hear myself as I cried toward the prostrate form on the cot, “Tom! Is that you? Are you all right?”

  There wasn’t any answer, not even a groan.

  Now I was beside him, my heart pounding and also my head where I’d struck it on the root.

  “Tom!” I cried again. “Are you all right? Are you—”

  Still there wasn’t any answer.

  My hands reached out to the form on the cot, felt it.

  But it wasn’t Tom. It wasn’t anybody. It was only a pile of bedding. Tom wasn’t there.

  Where on earth was he?

  And then I heard a groan from somewhere. The very second I heard it, I knew it was Tom Till’s groan, and I knew where he was. He was under the cot, hiding.

  I was on my hands and knees in the half-dark now, calling above the din on the roof, “Tom! Are you all right? Did you get struck by lightning?”

  I reached under to touch him, but he shrank back farther under.

  “Don’t hurt me! Don’t hurt me! I didn’t mean to throw water in your face! I’m sorry!”

  Just then I heard others of the gang coming. Before they would get there, I knew I had to say something to Tom. In my memory I was seeing myself standing by their picket gate and Tom by their wooden-handled pump. I seemed to feel again the splashing of cold well water in my face and hear Tom saying that only sissies went to Sunday school.

  And just outside the gate was savage-faced Shorty Long with a baseball bat in his hands.

  And again I was remembering I had said to Tom, “If I ever catch you alone somewhere … I’ll whale the living daylights out of you.”

  Now I knew why Tom had run away from me. Why, even now, he was scared and begging me not to hurt him. Tom Till knew Bill Collins had a fierce temper when he wasn’t ruling it, and he was afraid of me.

  A big lump came up into my throat, and I exclaimed under the cot to him, “Come on out, Tom. I won’t hurt you. I’m your friend. I want to be your friend, and I’m not mad at you anymore!”

  It was one of the happiest endings to one of the most worried experiences of my life.

  Tom hadn’t any sooner believed me and come out, than the gang, wet as drowned kittens, came crawling into the tent. In a little while we had all explained everything to each other—almost everything, that is.

  We were so happy that Tom was alive and all right that there wasn’t a one of us who wasn’t ready to forgive him for bei
ng Shorty Long’s friend and acting ornery to us.

  It was a wonderful feeling with everybody forgiven by everybody and nobody mad at anybody.

  In about seven minutes the rain let up. In fact, all of a sudden it just stopped, and we all came out into the clean-smelling, storm-washed world and stretched our very wet selves and looked around to see what damage the storm had done.

  That’s when I exclaimed to Tom, “Hey! You had your tent pitched over there—how come it’s here under the ponderosa? I thought—”

  “We moved it that day you got stuck in the sycamore tree. Remember—you told us that about lightning!”

  Then did I ever feel fine! So fine I could have screamed to let out some of the happiness inside. The reason Tom Till was alive now instead of lying like a dead horse was because I’d ruled my spirit enough to tell even Shorty Long his tent was pitched in a dangerous place. I might not be better than any conqueror who captured a city, but I’ll bet I felt better.

  While we were looking at the ugly gash on the cottonwood’s trunk, I noticed something else. On the ground, buried in the ground in the exact spot where the tent had been pitched before, was a big ten-inch-in-diameter branch that had fallen, broken off by the fierce wind.

  I stood looking down at it, thinking, Even if the lightning hadn’t struck the tree, if Tom had been inside the tent under the cot, if the tent had been here instead of under the pine tree, he would have been killed by the falling branch.

  Just then, Dragonfly let out a happy yell, “Here comes old Redskin!”

  I’d been in so much excitement that I hadn’t even missed Dragonfly’s grown-up puppy that had bloodhound blood in him.

  We looked, and sure enough there was his dog, out in the middle of the creek, swimming as fast as he could to get across to where we were.

  “Where’s he been?” I asked.

  “He’s scared of storms. He always runs and hides when it thunders and lightnings.”

  There was one thing more that needed explaining. How had our scarecrow gotten into the boat? Somebody had to put it in.