Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 19-24

by Paul Hutchens

  “OK, smarty,” I said. “Right this way.” I led him to the orchard fence, looked over, and told him, “Right over there under the Early Elberta peach tree. I threw the carcass right over … right over … right …”

  I stopped saying “right,” because I was wrong. There weren’t any feathered remains of one of Mom’s best laying pullets—not under the peach tree or anywhere in a wide circle all around it.

  What, I thought, on earth!

  It was too much like yesterday, when there hadn’t been any wildcat or any rabbit or any whopper of a bass. I’d been dreaming about that bass, and last night I’d been dreaming about herring in a sea of dew. It just didn’t make sense.

  Poetry stooped and picked up a white feather—a wing feather from one of Mom’s hens, I supposed. He tucked it under the band of his straw hat and squawked a stanza of a song every boy knows:

  “Yankee Doodle went to town,

  Riding on a pony,

  Stuck a feather in his hat

  And called it macaroni.”

  Then he asked sarcastically, “How come he didn’t call it baloney?”

  Then Poetry got a serious expression on his face. Maybe it was because he saw the angry tears in my eyes or maybe because he was my best friend—anyway, he had been. He laid an arm across my shoulder and said, “If you say there was a possum, there was a possum. No reason why he couldn’t have eaten the rest of the pullet or dragged it away somewhere.”

  I gulped, swung around, scooped up Mixy, who was meowing at my feet, and cuddled her a little. Then I started for the toolshed to get a spade. It’d be a wonderful morning to go fishing after yesterday’s rain. It might be a good idea to get started before Dad came home.

  The garden was too wet to hoe potatoes anyway. It’s not good for potatoes to be hoed when the ground is soaking wet.

  We left a note on the kitchen table for my dad, telling him where we were and telling him about our being invited to eat raspberry pie and roast beef at Poetry’s house that noon.

  That was another thing I found out: The gang’s mothers had made it up among them to have Dad and me eat all our noon meals at their different houses every day while Mom was in Memory City celebrating my cousin’s new baby sister or brother.

  It was fun digging the worms. The best place on our farm was not far from Addie’s pig house. I used the spade, and Poetry used his hands to break up the big damp clods and pick up the worms.

  “Angleworms or earthworms,” Poetry began in what Dad would call a philosophical tone of voice, “are very helpful to the farmer. They eat dirt, swallowing it whole like fish eat fishing worms. What they can’t digest, they pile up in little piles around their burrows. In this way, they bring the deeper parts of the richer soil to the surface.” It sounded like something he had memorized.

  It surely felt good to have him seem his good old mischievous self again and to feel that he liked me. I knew what he was saying was the truth about earthworms, because I had learned it myself, listening to a 4-H club speaker at a meeting different ones of our fathers had taken us to.

  Addie, in her pen, seemed a lot more nervous than usual. She was squealing and complaining as if she hadn’t already had her breakfast of corn and tankage and a pail of milk from the separator.

  Poetry stopped squawking about earthworms eating earth the way fish eat fishing worms. Looking at Addie, he began quoting in a singsong tone the little ditty he had quoted to her one other time, changing one of the lines a little to make it sound funnier:

  “Six little pigs in the straw with their mother,

  Bright tails, curly eyes, tumbling on each other;

  Bring them apples from the orchard trees,

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

  He started to singsong it again. Then he stopped, stared, and yelled, “I thought there were six little pigs! She’s only got five!”

  He was joking, I thought. It was a good poem to quote, cute and just right for Addie to hear. She was so proud of her frisky little curly tailed family. There were six in the poem and six in the pen.

  Poetry plopped down his bait can. It fell on its side, and the squirming worms started to worm their way out in every direction there is. He quick set the can right side up, scooped up each runaway worm, and put it back in. There was a very sober expression on his face as he asked me, “How many pigs is she supposed to have?”

  “Six!” I answered. “Don’t you remember? You saw them the morning after they were born, the day Chuck Hammer was here!”

  His answer came in a grim voice, “She’s got only five now. You sure one of ’em didn’t die?”

  I still thought he was only pretending to be excited, so I said, “Oh, the other one’ll be back in the pig house somewhere.” But his excitement was like measles. It was contagious, and I was about to catch it from him. I was seeing again what I’d seen last night—two fiery eyes too wide apart and too high from the ground to have been Mixy’s.

  We left our spade and the can of worms and in a minute were inside the hog lot, looking all over for a cute little curly tailed rascal of a piggie that was probably taking a nap or wallowing in the mud all by himself.

  We looked inside the pig house, under the straw, all around under the weeds in the lot, and there wasn’t any little red-haired pig child—not in the straw with its mother or anywhere else.

  All of a sudden Poetry’s eyes narrowed, and for an anxious moment we stared at each other. Then he said excitedly, pointing down at a patch of chocolate-colored grass near the gate, “That looks like dried blood!”

  I had been afraid to tell him what I thought I had seen at this very place last night, but now, I decided, was the time to tell. I was sure now that those two fiery eyes had belonged to Old Stubtail himself. He had really come back from Parke County.

  “I saw Old Stubtail last night,” I said. “He was crouching right here. When I turned my flashlight on him, he slunk away.”

  Poetry whistled an exclamation that said he was getting even more excited. It also seemed to say that this time he really believed me.

  No wonder Old Red Addie had been acting so strange. She’d lost one of her little red-haired family and, like Little Bo Peep and her lost sheep, didn’t know where to find it. It would never come home, wagging its pretty curly tail behind it. It would never go to market, never have roast beef, and never go, “Wee-wee-wee” all the way home.

  Just then we heard the voice of a running boy, calling from the woods across the road and using the high-pitched tone anybody uses when he is calling a horse.

  I unlatched my eyes from the chocolate-colored stains on the ground near the pigpen gate and looked past “Theodore Collins” on our mailbox to the woods across the gravel road. I saw a blue-jeaned, striped-T-shirted boy with flushed face, mussed-up hair, crooked nose, and dragonfly-like eyes spindle-legging his way along the path made by barefoot boys toward the fence and us.

  “You guys seen anything of Molly?” he shouted as he came. He kept on running, now yelling up and all around, “Co, Molly! Co, Molly! Where in the world are you?”

  Molly, I knew, was their sorrel mare. She was always getting out of their pasture and into other people’s pastures or woods or cornfields and was almost as wild as Shorty Long’s blue cow—the one you can read about in the story The Blue Cow.

  Even though Poetry and I had something extra-serious on our minds, Poetry managed to say mischievously, “Leave her alone and she’ll come home, bringing her tail behind her.”

  “She’ll bring two tails if she does come,” Dragonfly panted, stopping and still short of breath from running.

  “Two tails?” Poetry squawked back. “Don’t be funny!”

  “She’s going to have a little colt,” Dragonfly explained excitedly. “She’s run away somewhere so she can have it all by herself. Come on, you guys! Help me find her! I saw her tracks down at the spring, but she wasn’t there. She might be along the bayou somewhere!”

  I don’t k
now why I said what I said right then. Maybe I shouldn’t have, because it almost scared Dragonfly out of what few wits he had. Even though I said it to Poetry and not to Dragonfly, the worried little guy overheard.

  What I said was: “Wildcats would rather eat colt meat than any other kind, except deer and little pigs.”

  Dragonfly’s answer was a scared scream. “Wildcats!”

  There was no use trying to keep the pop-eyed little guy in the dark about what we knew. So, as fast as we could, we told him about yesterday and last night, showed him the dried blood at Addie’s gate, let him count the pigs, and got him as scared as we could before reminding him of what most hunters know-that a wildcat doesn’t ever attack a human being unless it’s cornered or thinks it is and also thinks it has to attack to protect itself.

  “But I thought Old Stubtail was in Parke County!” Dragonfly said.

  “He was supposed to be. Maybe he just has a brother down there,” I answered, surprised at what I had thought to say.

  The three of us made a quick decision to get going on the search for Molly and get her home and safe in her box stall. Once there, she could celebrate the birth of her baby colt in peace, and there wouldn’t be any danger of Old Stubtail’s sneaking up on her wherever she was and killing and eating her colt.

  As I went into the house to get Betty Lizzie, I was a little bothered about the last part of the eighth commandment for hunting safety. That commandment seemed to be staring at me from the examination paper I’d written out for Dad: “Don’t hunt with more than one companion.”

  But when I told Poetry about it, he said kind of loftyike, “Oh, that’s just when they have a gun apiece! Don’t you remember? Sometimes the whole gang of us has gone hunting at night with Circus’s dad.”

  I wasn’t sure he was right, though, so I ordered both Dragonfly and Poetry to stay behind me as we started toward the spring and the bayou to see if we could find Dragonfly’s family’s sorrel mare.

  At the spring we saw her tracks, but she herself wasn’t there.

  Up the hill we went, past the leaning linden tree, past the black widow stump, and east along the border of the bayou to the rail fence, on the other side of which is Dragonfly’s dad’s pasture. I was still in the lead with Betty Lizzie, ready to shoot if I had to.

  At the fence a covey of quail exploded out of their hiding place and fanned out into the air in seven or eight different directions, like a giant-sized peacock tail opening. They skimmed over the fence and across a corner of the field and disappeared in good quail cover about a hundred yards up the bayou.

  I had Betty Lizzie up and aimed. I almost pulled the trigger but didn’t, for I knew I’d just waste a shot. Besides, the season wasn’t open for quail, and if I killed one I’d be breaking the law.

  I kept Betty Lizzie’s safety on all the time, which is part of rule number four, and unloaded her before climbing over the fence to go down into the marshy sedge and brush that bordered the bayou pond.

  Over the fence and with Betty Lizzie loaded again, I was careful to keep her muzzle either up or down, always pointed away from all of us, so that if I stumbled over anything and she discharged, the bullet would go off toward the sky or into the ground.

  We had no sooner reached the bayou pond and started to skirt it than Dragonfly let out a yell. “There she is! Away over there by the swimming hole! See her! She’s all right and safe!”

  She was safe, all right, but she wasn’t all right—not in her mind. She acted as if she didn’t have good horse sense. She was as nervous and trembling as Old Red Addie had been.

  Then Dragonfly let out another yell. He broke out from behind me and started a knee-pumping sprint toward the swimming hole and Molly, crying, “Look! She’s not fat anymore. She’s already had her colt! Let’s go see what color it is!”

  I swung Betty’s muzzle away and quickly unloaded her, because it wasn’t safe to have a loaded gun around such an excited boy.

  Dragonfly got there ahead of either Poetry or me. “See,” he exclaimed proudly, pointing to Molly’s colt, lying on its side on the ground. “He’s got a white spot on his forehead and one on his rump and … and …”

  Then that spindle-legged, pop-eyed, crooked-nosed little guy let out a bloodcurdling scream, crying, “He’s dead! He’s been killed! He’s got blood all over him!”

  7

  It was one of the saddest sights I’d ever seen. Molly’s beautiful brand-new colt, with a long snow-white streak down its forehead all the way from its forelock to the tip of its nose, was lying a few feet from the creek, dead.

  I felt myself cringing and scared and wondering. I could see where the teeth of some wild animal had slashed the colt’s neck in front of the shoulders and had broken it. And just behind the shoulders there was a bloody place where something had eaten its way in to dig out the heart and liver.

  “My colt!” Dragonfly sobbed. “Dad was going to give it to me! What could of done it! What could of!” He broke into wild sobbing that was like a knife jabbing into my heart. Already the bluebottle flies were swarming around the dead colt.

  I was holding onto Betty Lizzie, feeling safer just by having her with us. And all the time I was wondering where old Stubtail was by now. What if right that very minute he would break out from behind the shrubbery to get a middle-of-the-morning snack!

  It was a shame to have such a beautiful morning spoiled by such dangerous excitement. I was so stirred up inside that the water singing in the riffle below the Sugar Creek swimming hole, the friendly breeze fanning my face, and the juicy notes of the red-winged blackbirds in the trees that bordered the bayou didn’t seem wonderful at all, the way they nearly always had other times when I was there.

  Dragonfly was so angry and excited and unhappy that I decided to try to cheer him up a little by saying, “We’ll put Circus’s dad’s hounds on his trail again, and this time we’ll get him. We’ll—”

  Dragonfly didn’t let me finish. He cut in, his voice trembling and with fire in his eyes, loudly exclaiming, “We’ll catch him and kill him and cut his heart out!”

  It had been a long time since I’d seen Dragonfly so angry. If he hadn’t been a Christian, he’d probably have used swear words, which not a one of the gang ever used. It wouldn’t be fair to the Person we all tried to live for and whose Name shouldn’t be treated as though it was just so much dirt.

  I’d maybe better explain right here that it was our Sunday school teacher who had taught us that, saying one morning in class, “Cowards and thoughtless people throw the Name of our Savior around like it was just so much dirt.”

  It was bad enough having one little red pig stolen and probably eaten. It seemed worse for old Molly to have her only colt killed right in front of her eyes, maybe not more than a few hours after it had been born. It had hardly learned to walk.

  Right then is when we heard a dog’s voice, a long-toned, bell-like voice that I knew in a flash belonged to Circus’s hound pup.

  “It’s Ichabod!” Dragonfly exclaimed. “He’s already found the trail! Come on!” He started off on the run, down the path that led to the bayou, with Poetry and me right after him.

  I had Betty Lizzie still unloaded and was wondering how I could obey all the Ten Commandments of Hunting Safety when there were three of us. It’d be almost impossible to keep the fifth commandment, which was never to climb a tree or a fence with a loaded gun. We’d probably have a fence to climb every few minutes. If Ichabod had really found Old Stubtail’s trail, he might this time actually stay with it, and we might all of a sudden come upon the colt killer at bay against a rock wall or an outcrop in Old Man Paddler’s hills. I might have to shoot quick, or one or the other of us would get killed.

  It seemed I ought to have the gun loaded. It also seemed I ought not.

  I knew what Dad would say if he were there. I also knew what Big Jim, our leader, would order us not to do: not let ourselves get into a dangerous hurry but, instead, call Ichabod off the trail and wait for Circus�
�s dad to get back from Parke County with his hounds to organize a hunt with grown-up men.

  I kept Betty Lizzie unloaded, so that it would be safe for Poetry and me to run pell-mell after Dragonfly and after Ichabod, whose voice said he was on the other side of the bayou, up in the woods near where we’d flushed the covey of quail.

  Pretty soon we were there ourselves. But Ichabod was already gone, galloping in the direction of the leaning linden tree, following the row of evergreens toward the black widow stump. And Dragonfly was still running faster than either Poetry or me.

  I yelled for him to stop, but he wouldn’t. I was close enough to him to see that he had his Boy Scout knife out and its blade open. That really made me worry.

  “Stop!” I ordered him in my most savage voice. “Don’t ever run with an open-bladed knife! You could fall on it and kill yourself! You could cut your own heart out!”

  I had warned him too late. All of a sudden, as Dragonfly reached the incline above the spring, he stumbled over something and went down in a topsy-turvy flip-flopping fall. He had been running so fast that falling didn’t stop him. He rolled over the lip of the hill and disappeared.

  I screamed and ran faster, expecting that when I got there I’d see he had hurt himself with his own knife.

  Then, from the direction of the papaw bushes I heard Circus’s voice scolding loud and hard. “Stop it! Come back here, you mongrel! Leave that rabbit alone!”

  I knew Ichabod wasn’t any mongrel, which is a dog of mixed breed. Ichabod was a purebred black-and-tan. Circus was calling him a mongrel because he was disgusted with him for some reason.

  In an instant, Poetry and I were where Dragonfly had fallen. I certainly felt relieved when I saw he hadn’t cut himself in the fall but was only sprawled in a puddle on the other side of the spring reservoir. His hands and his face, jeans, and shirt were covered with mud. His knife was lying beside him.