Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 19-24

by Paul Hutchens

  Tom didn’t want to tell us at first, until we promised we wouldn’t hold it against him.

  “Bob did it. But don’t be mad at him. He’s my brother. He threw it into the boat and shoved the boat out into the creek. I swam out to stop the boat from floating away. I heard you coming and got scared and …”

  Tom looked at me, and I looked at him and grinned. He grinned back, and I knew for sure that we were friends again.

  Just then Little Jim cried happily, “The sun’s out! And there’s a rainbow!”

  And there was a rainbow, as pretty and bright as I’d ever seen. It was arched clear across the eastern sky. It was so extrabeautiful it almost hurt your heart to look at it.

  My mind picked me up and took me in a flash back to the Collins living room just after the last electrical storm. I saw my mother standing, looking out the east window and saying reverently, “I set My bow in the cloud.”

  My thoughts were interrupted almost right away by Dragonfly letting out a long-tailed sneeze, followed by another and then another. Each sneeze had “Snatzerpazooka” mixed up in it, and that reminded us of our scarecrow.

  We all went over to our boat and looked down at the saddest-looking thing you ever saw.

  “Tomorrow, we’ll come and get him and hang him up again,” Big Jim said. “We’d all better be getting on home now, or our folks’ll be worried half sick.”

  “My mother will,” Dragonfly said. He hissed to his dog and started on the run for the bridge. Then he stopped, looked back, and called to us, “We start for the Rockies the second week in July, if any of you want to go with us.”

  As I followed in the path, it seemed I was already on my way out West. In fact, all of a sudden I was a Western marshal on a beautiful white stallion, galloping across the plains through the sagebrush and the tumbleweed and shooting my six-shooters into the air to let everybody know that the law was on its way.

  The Sugar Creek Gang Series:

  1 The Swamp Robber

  2 The Killer Bear

  3 The Winter Rescue

  4 The Lost Campers

  5 The Chicago Adventure

  6 The Secret Hideout

  7 The Mystery Cave

  8 Palm Tree Manhunt

  9 One Stormy Day

  10 The Mystery Thief

  11 Teacher Trouble

  12 Screams in the Night

  13 The Indian Cemetery

  14 The Treasure Hunt

  15 Thousand Dollar Fish

  16 The Haunted House

  17 Lost in the Blizzard

  18 On the Mexican Border

  19 The Green Tent Mystery

  20 The Bull Fighter

  21 The Timber Wolf

  22 Western Adventure

  23 The Killer Cat

  24 The Colorado Kidnapping

  25 The Ghost Dog

  26 The White Boat Rescue

  27 The Brown Box Mystery

  28 The Watermelon Mystery

  29 The Trapline Thief

  30 The Blue Cow

  31 Treehouse Mystery

  32 The Cemetery Vandals

  33 The Battle of the Bees

  34 Locked in the Attic

  35 Runaway Rescue

  36 The Case of Missing Calf

  Paul Hutchens

  MOODY PUBLISHERS

  CHICAGO

  © 1958, 1998 by

  PAULINE HUTCHENS WILSON

  Revised Edition, 1998

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  All Scripture quotations are taken from the New American Standard Bible, © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, and 1994 by The Lockman Foundation, La Habra, Calif. Used by permission.

  Original Title: We Killed a Wildcat at Sugar Creek

  ISBN: 978-0-8024-7027-0

  We hope you enjoy this book from Moody Publishers. Our goal is to provide high-quality, thought-provoking books and products that connect truth to your real needs and challenges. For more information on other books and products written and produced from a biblical perspective, go to www.moodypublishers.com or write to:

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  PREFACE

  Hi—from a member of the Sugar Creek Gang!

  It’s just that I don’t know which one I am. When I was good, I was Little Jim. When I did bad things—well, sometimes I was Bill Collins or even mischievous Poetry.

  You see, I am the daughter of Paul Hutchens, and I spent many an hour listening to him read his manuscript as far as he had written it that particular day. I went along to the north woods of Minnesota, to Colorado, and to the various other places he would go to find something different for the Gang to do.

  Now the years have passed—more than fifty, actually. My father is in heaven, but the Gang goes on. All thirty-six books are still in print and now are being updated for today’s readers with input from my five children, who also span the decades from the ’50s to the ’70s.

  The real Sugar Creek is in Indiana, and my father and his six brothers were the original Gang. But the idea of the books and their ministry were and are the Lord’s. It is He who keeps the Gang going.

  PAULINE HUTCHENS WILSON

  1

  The first time anybody around Sugar Creek knew for sure there was a bloodthirsty, savage-tempered wildcat in the territory was when one of them sneaked into Harm Groenwald’s pasture and killed three of his prize lambs.

  I never will forget the hair-raising chills that ran up and down my spine the morning I heard about it.

  We had just finished breakfast at our house when we got the news. It had been one of the most peaceful breakfasts we had had in a long time. Charlotte Ann, my mischievous-minded, usually-hard-to-manage baby sister had been being especially well behaved, not fussing or whining but behaving like most babies don’t in the morning.

  My grayish-brown-haired mother was sipping her coffee quietly and had a very contented look on her face as we all waited for my bushy-eyebrowed father to finish reading the Bible story he had just started.

  As I listened, I didn’t have any idea that part of what he was reading was going to get mixed up in the excitement of a wildcat hunt before the summer would pass.

  The short Bible story was about a grown-up boy named Jacob, who had had a quarrel with his brother, Esau. To save his life he left home to go to another country where his mother used to live.

  The first night of the long journey was spent in very rocky territory with steep cliffs and outcrops and different-shaped boulders piled on each other. It made me think of the rocky hills above Old Man Paddler’s cabin. In fact, the hills in that part of Sugar Creek territory were not far from the haunted house we all knew about, and they were the best place in the world for wildcats to live and hunt and raise their families. Of course, I didn’t think of that while Mom was sipping her coffee and Charlotte Ann was playing with her cute, pink, bare toes and Dad was reading along in his deep, gruff voice.

  Anyway, while Jacob slept outdoors that night—using a stone for a pillow—he had a dream about a stairway leading all the way up to heaven. In the dream he saw angels going up and down on it.

  In a minute Dad would finish reading, and then we’d have what Mom calls a Quaker prayer meeting. That means we’d all be quiet a minute and each one would think his own prayer to God just before Dad or Mom or maybe I would pray with out-loud words, and our day would be started right.

  Then is when, all of a sudden, the phone started ringing in our front room.

  I listened to see whether it was going to be our ring or somebody else’s. I knew all the gang’s numbers by heart: two longs and a short for Little Jim; two shorts and a long for Poetry; three shorts for Circus; two
shorts for Big Jim; four shorts for Dragonfly; and ours was one long and one short.

  Different other neighbors had different other numbers.

  On our phone system, all anybody on our seven-phone line had to do if he wanted to talk to any other family on the line was to go to the phone, lift the receiver, and ring whatever number he wanted.

  Of course, everybody on the party line could hear the phone ring in their own house and would know who was being called but not who was calling —unless they lifted their own receiver and did what is called “eavesdropping.” Nobody was supposed to do that, but different people sometimes did and made different people mad at each other.

  There was also a special ring, which was hardly ever used. It was called an “emergency ring,” and nobody was supposed to ring it unless there was an actual emergency, such as an accident or a death in the family or somebody’s cow had run away and couldn’t be found. That emergency ring was two extra long longs and two very short shorts.

  Well, our heads were all bowed at our breakfast table, and in my imagination I was up in the hills not far from the haunted house, lying on a stone pillow and watching angels moving up and down a golden stairway, sort of like people riding up and down on an escalator in a department store. And that was when I heard the jangling of the telephone. My mind was jarred all the way back to our kitchen table, and I was hearing the extralong ring, followed by another just-as-long long and then two short, sharp shorts.

  “Emergency!” Mom, sitting beside Charlotte Ann’s high chair, exclaimed, jumping like a scared rabbit that had been shot at and missed. A startled look came over her face, and she was out of her chair in a flurry, accidentally knocking over her chair to get across the kitchen floor as fast as she could, into the living room and to the phone to answer it.

  All that excitement brought Charlotte Ann to baby-style life. Her arms flew out and up in several directions. She knocked over her blue mug of white milk, which spilled over the edge of her tray and splashed onto the floor. Mixy, our black-and-white house cat came from her box of straw by the kitchen stove and started lapping up as much of the spilled milk as she could before anybody in the family could mop it up and it’d be wasted.

  In the living room Mom’s voice gasped, “What! A wildcat! Who said so? How do you know?”

  I was out of my chair even faster than Mom had gotten out of hers. I stood beside her at the phone, straining my ears to hear whoever’s voice was on the other end of the line, but I couldn’t. That is, I couldn’t hear any one voice. Instead, because Mom had her receiver about an inch from her ear, I heard a jumble of what sounded like a dozen women’s voices. Everybody was talking to everybody, and almost nobody was listening to anybody.

  I tell you there was a lot of excitement around our house after Mom hung up and explained what the emergency was. It was Harm Groenwald’s fast-talking wife who had rung the emergency number. They’d had three of their prize lambs killed last night. Their carcasses had been torn in the same way that two of their other lambs had been a year ago.

  “This time I’m going to find out what killed them!” Harm had told his wife. “I’m going to call Chuck Hammer.”

  Mrs. Groenwald said the Sugar Creek veterinarian had hurried out from town to have a look at the dead lambs. He used to live out West and had seen kills like that before. He turned the bodies over a few times and said grimly, “We’ve got either a mountain lion or a monster wildcat on our hands. They both kill the same way. See here?”

  He showed Harm what he meant. “They always crush the neck bones in front of the shoulders, then tear into the carcass behind the shoulders and eat the heart and liver first.”

  “But whoever heard of a mountain lion or a wildcat around here?” Harm objected. “They don’t live in this part of the country!”

  “One does,” Chuck said, “and he’s a big one! Huge!”

  They found its tracks in a muddy place, and Chuck said, “Wildcat! I’d say thirty-five pounds, anyway. Maybe forty-five!”

  Harm Groenwald’s fast-talking, high-pitched-voiced wife told all that to all the people who had answered the emergency ring—told it in less than a minute and a half. It took Mom almost three minutes to tell it to Dad and me.

  Dad quick got on the phone then and asked the vet, who was still at Groenwald’s house, to stop at our farm on his way back to town. Addie, our red mother hog, had given us a litter of six pigs last night, and Dad thought Chuck ought to look her over and maybe suggest a better diet for her so that her babies would grow stronger fast.

  I helped Mom clean up Charlotte Ann’s spilled milk and finished just in time to go out to the hog lot where Dad and the veterinarian were talking about the monster of a wildcat and also where Chuck was giving Addie a physical checkup.

  “She’s all right,” he told Dad. “She’s given you six of the healthiest pigs I’ve ever seen. Not a runt in the litter.”

  Poetry, my best friend, had heard the emergency ring and was on the way to our house to talk it over with me when he’d hitched a ride with Chuck. So he was there, too. That was one reason I didn’t quite finish helping Mom clean up the kitchen. I needed to get out where all the excitement was.

  Standing by Addie’s gate, Poetry started a singsongy little ditty he’d learned somewhere:

  “Six little pigs in the straw with their mother,

  Bright eyes, curly tails, tumbling on each other;

  Bring them apples from the orchard trees,

  And hear those piggies say, ‘Please, please, please.’”

  I told Poetry it was a cute rhyme, and that started him off in a singsong again.

  In fact, right that minute there was a glad singsong feeling in my mind. There had been ever since Harm Groenwald’s wife had told Mom and Mom had told Dad and me that it was a wildcat that had killed Harm’s two lambs last year as well as this year’s three. It had been a wildcat and not a dog that had done it!

  You know why I was glad if you’ve read the story The Bull Fighter. I never will forget those 10,000 minutes—which is how many minutes it took for a week to pass. Wally, my city cousin, had spent the whole 10,000 minutes at our farm. And Alexander the Coppersmith, his ill-mannered, city-bred dog, had been with him, the most uncontrollable dog there ever was.

  Anyway, the night Harm Groenwald’s two lambs were killed was the same night Wally’s nervous mongrel had unleashed himself. It was my fault that his collar was too loose. My fault, I had thought again and again, that two innocent lambs had been killed!

  I hadn’t told anybody. One reason was that, if they ever proved it was Wally’s dog that had done it, then Alexander would have to be shot, and I’d be to blame for his death, too. It’d be a shame for a city dog that didn’t know any better to have to lose his life.

  So I’d put off telling anybody, but I shouldn’t have. I should have told what Alexander did before Wally took his dog home to Memory City with him.

  But now I’d never have to! Feeling glad in my heart toward God for making everything work out the way it had, and because I was in the habit of talking out loud to Him anytime I felt like it, I all of a sudden said, “Thanks! Thanks a lot!”

  Poetry, not knowing what I’d been thinking, answered with his squawky, ducklike voice, “I’m glad you like it. I’ll sing it again.” And he was off in another half-bass singsong about the six little pigs in the straw with their mother.

  We were all interrupted then by the sound of dogs’ voices coming from the direction of Harm Groenwald’s pasture. I’d heard those same long-voiced hounds before. My mind’s eye told me it was Jay and Bawler, Circus Browne’s dad’s big coonhounds. I was sure they were on the trail of the wildcat. Already Harm Groenwald had called on the best hunter with the best hounds in the whole territory to help him catch the wild beast that had killed his sheep.

  Many a time at night I’d heard those dog voices hot on a coon trail along the bayou or the swamp or in the rocky hill country above Old Man Paddler’s Lincoln-style cabin.


  Jay is a big, long-bodied, hundred-pound bluetick with a deep, hollow bawl. Bawler is a lanky black-and-tan only about half as big as Jay. She has a high-pitched wail that sends chills up and down your spine when she’s excited and going strong on a trail.

  “Let’s go join the hunt!” Poetry exclaimed.

  And I answered, “Sure! Let’s go.”

  Dad stopped us, though, by saying, “No, it’s an organized hunt. The men have guns, and they won’t want any boys along.”

  It didn’t feel good to be stopped, but we weren’t the only boys who didn’t get to go. Circus, the best athlete and the acrobat of our gang, Dan Browne’s only son, didn’t get to go, either.

  In a few minutes, there he was, coming through the orchard toward us. On a leash, running all around him in a lot of excitement, was his new hound pup he had named “Ichabod,” one of the cutest black-and-tans you ever saw.

  “The hounds are coming this way,” Poetry cried. “Listen! That means Old Stubtail came this direction last night after he killed the lambs. I’ll bet he’s got his home down in the swamp or maybe along the bayou!”

  “Or in the cave,” a voice behind us piped up. It was Little Jim, the smallest member of the gang, who had come without making any noise.

  Old Bawler and Jay were really coming our way. Already they were in the lane at the south side of our pasture—over the fence, through the pasture and watermelon patch, and straight for the pignut trees at the north end of our garden.

  That was enough to scare me. It meant that last night after Old Stubtail, as Circus called him, had had his lamb dinner at Groenwalds’, he had come across our south pasture, through our farmyard, and had been only a hundred yards from our henhouse and—

  I got my thoughts interrupted then by the hound pup on Circus’s leash going simply wild with excitement because Bawler was his mother, and he wanted to get into the excitement, whatever it was.

  The pup was at the end of his leash, pulling and tugging and struggling wildly. And then his collar was over his head, and he was off toward the pignut trees to join in whatever kind of dog game his mother and old Jay were playing.