Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 19-24

by Paul Hutchens

  He was maybe remembering also that the One who had made the world had saved his father one night in a Good News Crusade, and Mr. Browne hadn’t taken even one drink since.

  Quick as a flash, Circus swung back his strong right arm and gave that flask a fierce throw down the shore. For a few seconds my eyes followed the bottle flashing in the sunlight, then I heard it crash as it struck a rock at the head of the riffle. That was maybe the twenty-fifth time I’d seen Circus do that to a bottle like that. Not a one of us said a word, but we were thinking.

  We all caught hands again and waded on out across the swimming hole. We’d taken only a few more slow, cautious steps when Poetry suddenly squeezed my hand three or four times to get my attention. Leaning over, he whispered, “I know what could have happened to the woman.”

  Just that second, Dragonfly on the opposite end of our hand-to-hand line, let out a couple of explosive sneezes and broke loose with a yell, crying, “Hey, everybody! I’ve found something down on the bottom! It feels like an old gunnysack with … with … with … ouch! Something bit me on the big toe!”

  Dragonfly’s scared yell, exploding in the middle of our safe swimming exploration of the bottom of the creek, sent us on a splashety-sizzle dash to where he was.

  The water there was almost waist high to Dragonfly and a little more than hip high to Big Jim.

  Even while Big Jim was going over to see what it was, my mind was trying to imagine what kind of wild animal with sharp teeth would be alive in a gunnysack on the bottom of our swimming hole—and why?

  And how could it be alive?

  Big Jim’s feet told him Dragonfly had really discovered something strange down there, and in seconds he was down and up again with a sure-enough gunnysack with something in it. The neck of the sack was drawn shut and tied with several twists of binder twine wrapped round and round.

  “Look!” Poetry exclaimed, puffing for breath from the excitement and because of the fast trip he’d made from the other end of the line to where we were. “There are two bricks tied to it! That’s what Dragonfly bumped into.”

  I’d already seen two red bricks, each the kind with a hole in the center, wired to the neck of the sack. And already I was guessing what was inside.

  In a little while we had splashed our way to shore, none of us stopping until we got to the Snatzerpazooka tree, where our clothes were and where, on the old scarecrow’s wooden left shoulder, Dragonfly’s hat still was.

  Little Jim was shaking as though he had the shivers. His fists were doubled up, and there were tears in his eyes.

  Now the sack was open—and that’s when Little Jim let out a heartrending cry. “That’s my kitty! That’s Crescendo! Somebody stole her and drowned her!” Then he broke out into the saddest crying I ever heard.

  There certainly isn’t anything musical about a boy’s crying over a killed calico cat. Seeing Little Jim’s tears and hearing his sobs woke up my temper. I could feel it getting hotter and hotter until, pretty soon maybe, it would be so hot it’d explode. I did ask a hot question with sizzling words, “Who would do it? Who would be mean enough to tie a beautiful cat in a sack, weight it with bricks, and throw it into the creek to drown?”

  Even while I was asking, I thought I knew the answer. Sure. The heartless boy would have to be Shorty Long, the meanest new boy in the neighborhood.

  Little Jim stooped and stared through his tears at his dead pet. He sniffled and then astonished us all by saying under his breath—not to us but to Somebody who was everywhere and whom Little Jim liked with all his heart—“Forgive them for … for killing Crescendo, for they don’t know what they are doing!”

  I knew what was in Little Jim’s mind right that second—the true story of something that had happened two thousand years ago on a hill close to a cemetery. For a second my thoughts flew out across the creek and over the trees past the white clouds floating in the bluest sky, across the United States, over the Atlantic Ocean, and back through history to the time and place where the Savior had died to take away the sins of the world. I saw Him in my mind’s eye, nailed to a cross, and heard with my mind’s ear the people jeering and calling Him names. I could almost hear Him say in a tone of voice that would break a boy’s heart to hear, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.”

  Just when I was all stirred up in my mind to want to give Shorty Long a licking within an inch of his life, Little Jim, whose cat Crescendo had been killed, was ready to forgive whoever had done it!

  It seemed kind of wonderful to have a boy like that as a member of the gang.

  Having a funeral for Crescendo—which we did, burying her in her burlap bag coffin under the Little Jim Tree up in the woods—took our minds off going swimming and, for a little while, off the mystery that was waiting for us out West when we would get there sometime next week.

  Maybe I’d better explain that it was Circus who suggested we bury Crescendo under the Little Jim Tree at the bottom of Bumblebee Hill. “The tree where Little Jim killed the fierce old mad mother bear and saved all our lives that time would make a good memorial for her,” he suggested.

  Little Jim’s face brightened a little at the idea.

  Most of us weren’t satisfied, though. It seemed we ought to form a posse, take a fast hike to Shorty Long’s house, and avenge the murder of Little Jim’s very pretty pet. But he wouldn’t let us.

  When the funeral was over, I watched for a chance to ask him why, and this is what that wonderful little guy answered: “My mother prays every night for Shorty Long’s mother that she’ll be saved.” With that, Little Jim took a fierce fast swipe with his walking stick at a mayapple growing all by itself about two feet away from a family of other ten-inch-high mayapple plants. The end of the stick struck the mayapple’s lemon-shaped yellowish fruit, which was overripe, squashed it to smithereens, and scattered its insides all over.

  We wouldn’t have time to go back and go in swimming now. We had to begin getting our suitcases packed for the early Monday morning start for the West.

  We did go down to the spring, though, to get a drink of water, and that was where Poetry, watching his chance to get me alone, finished what he’d started to tell me while we were wading around in our swimming hole—before he’d been interrupted by Dragonfly’s excited yell about what his feet had found.

  Poetry and I stopped at the Black Widow Stump while the rest of the gang went down the incline near the leaning linden tree to the spring below. “You want to know what I’ve figured out happened to the woman?” he asked me in a whisper.

  Of course, I wanted to know, and said so.

  And this is what he answered in the mysterious tone of voice he usually uses when he is talking detective stuff. “I’ve been studying maps of the Aspen territory and reading the folders. She could have stumbled along through the drifts, not seeing her way, and walked right out into one of the heated motel swimming pools and drowned, and—”

  I cut in on him to say, “But then they’d have found her, and there wouldn’t have been any mystery.”

  “That’s what I say,” he countered. “She could have, but she didn’t. Also, she could have hired a taxi for only ten dollars and fifty cents to drive her to Glenwood Springs, where she could have caught a train for Denver or somewhere and—”

  I tried to cut in on him again, but he shushed me, holding up a forefinger to warn me the gang was on its way back up the incline. He went on. “Or she could have walked the four-and-a-half miles west of town on Highway 82 to the Aspen airport and hired a pilot to fly her someplace.”

  “In a snowstorm?” I exclaimed at him. “In a wild blizzard at night, when every plane would have been grounded?” I was surly in my voice and in my mind, because I’d been hoping he had really thought up something sensible as to what happened to the mystery woman.

  All I had gotten out of what he had said was a little information about the place where we were going to spend our vacation. There was taxi service to Glenwood Springs, air se
rvice if you went out four-and-a-half miles into the country on Highway 82, and some of the motels had heated outdoor swimming pools.

  We got a chance to find out how wrong all Poetry’s ideas were when, right in the middle of our first week in the Rockies, we found a clue that sent showers of shivers up and down our spines and made our vacation one of the liveliest we’d ever had—and also one of the most important.

  3

  We certainly didn’t expect to find our first clue while we were still hundreds of miles from where we were going to spend our vacation—and in the most unexpected place!

  We camped the first night in a wooded area near a little river in a private campground the ranch owner called Lazywild. First, we set up the tent, made a fire in the outdoor fireplace, and helped Little Jim’s mother get their gasoline camp stove going. Then, because the river was close by, the sun was still up, and the weather extrahot, it seemed we ought to plunge in and work up still stronger appetites by swimming and splashing around a little.

  The rancher, whose name was Sam Alberson, warned us, “Take it easy out there, boys. We’ve had a lot of rain this summer, and there might be an old stump or two. Water was pretty high last week when that there cloudburst hit this part of the country. No use getting your shins skinned up. And I wouldn’t try diving. The water’s not deep enough.”

  As we’d done back home when we found Little Jim’s calico cat in a gunnysack, we tested the bottom of the stream first. We waded all the way across and back at the place we were going to swim in, and once up and down, but didn’t find anything except a couple of old tin cans. So we plunged in and had a wonderful time, getting ourselves good and hungry and a little more tired than we had been.

  Almost too soon, Little Jim’s mother called us to come to supper.

  At the same time, Circus, who was near the shore, exclaimed, “Look at this! Somebody’s been drinking here!”

  I looked where he was looking and saw a quart bottle shining in the late afternoon sun. Circus quickly stooped and picked it up. In a second, I thought, he’ll swing back his strong, long right arm and throw the bottle as far as he can.

  That was what he’d started to do, when Dragonfly stopped him, yelling, “Don’t throw that away! It’s got something in it. A letter or something!”

  And Dragonfly was right. Even with Little Jim’s mother’s voice still in my mind calling me to supper, and my own appetite pulling me toward camp, I still wanted to see what, if anything, was in the bottle Circus had found.

  You could have knocked me over with a sunbeam, I was so astonished at what we found in the bottle.

  When he had opened it, Circus took out a note and read it aloud.

  Whoever finds this, take warning! Alcohol is ruining my life. Try as I will, I cannot get free from the bottle. Someday it will kill me. It will do the same for you if you take it into your life.

  Around the campfire, while we were having hot cocoa, sandwiches, and the warmed-up spaghetti and meatballs Mom had sent along in a sealed container, we talked about the warning in the bottle and wondered who had put it there.

  We had just finished eating when the rancher in whose campground we had our tent pitched came out to see if there was anything we needed. Spying the empty bottle, he shook his head and frowned. “The Devil’s best friend. My father died an alcoholic, and my mother with a broken heart.” He looked with a scowl toward Little Jim’s father.

  It took Little Jim’s mother only a minute to make clear to long-mustached Sam Alberson that neither she nor her husband—and, of course, not a one of the Sugar Creek Gang-would be foolish enough to drink alcohol, which whiskey is one-half of.

  “It may be useful as a preservative in medicines and as an antiseptic, but as a beverage—no!” Little Jim’s usually mild-voiced mother had more fire in what she was saying than I’d ever heard her have. Hearing the Sugar Creek church’s pianist say that in that way made me realize my parents were even more right than I had thought they were when they had taught me never to use alcohol as a drink. I had promised them I never would.

  Circus broke in then, to say, “I found the empty bottle out there on the shore.”

  Sam Alberson’s attitude changed quickly at Little Jim’s mother’s answer and Circus’s explanation. “There was a sad case here some time ago because of this stuff. A young woman rented one of the cabins for a week—for her health, she said. She spent a lot of time writing and reading, hiking up and down the creek, and she rented one of our saddle horses every day. I didn’t know then that she was an alcoholic, because the first week she didn’t drink at all. But her second week was one long binge. She stopped swimming and boating and riding and just lay around camp.”

  Big Sam Alberson shook his head sadly, looking around the fire at all of us. Then he cleared his throat. The sound in the dark was a little like a bullfrog’s “Grum-m-m-mph.” Then he finished, “Such a beautiful woman! Her whole life ruined. I wonder what became of her.”

  Because we all wanted to be up early in the morning, break camp, and get going toward the Rockies, we quick had a short devotional time around the fire, and with the last words of Little Jim’s father’s prayer in my mind, I was in the tent with Circus and Poetry getting ready to undress and slip into my sleeping bag.

  Circus was going to keep the whiskey bottle for a souvenir of our trip, and he had the note that had been in it in his shirt pocket.

  “Let me see it a minute, will you?” Poetry asked Circus, who handed it over. “Care if I keep it for you in my wallet?”

  The note tucked in his wallet, Poetry whispered to me to come outside a minute. He had something to tell me, he said. What he told me was, “I’ve an idea. Let’s slip down to the camp office and get a bottle of pop.”

  But that wasn’t what he really wanted, I discovered when a little later we were in the room where Big Sam was reading and listening to the radio news. “Mr. Alberson, do you care if we look at your camp register to see if there’ve been any visitors from where we come from?”

  Big Sam didn’t care, so pretty soon Poetry and I were standing at the registration desk, poring over the names of people who had stopped at the camp. I still didn’t have any idea what was on his mind, but I noticed he had Circus’s note in one hand and was comparing the handwriting of different registrants with the writing that had been in the whiskey bottle.

  “What you trying to find?” I asked in a subdued whisper.

  His answer was in an indifferent tone. “Needle in a haystack—looks like anyway. You ever see such a guest book?”

  I never had. It was the kind of book anybody might expect, though, by the helter-skelter look of things around the place: Big Sam’s necktie hanging sloppily and his hair needing combing. Papers and magazines scattered here and there.

  The guest book was the loose-leaf kind with a ring binder, and some of the pages were upside down.

  A few seconds later Poetry let out a gasp and exclaimed, “See! Here it is! The same handwriting!”

  I looked at the place his finger was indicating, and there wasn’t any question at all about the two being the same. The handwriting on the note from the bottle was like that of the name on the register.

  “Connie Mae Spruce,” I said and thought what a pretty name it was.

  “Find anything?” Sam Alberson’s deep voice asked in our direction from the chair where he was reading the paper.

  “Nobody from Sugar Creek,” Poetry’s duck-like voice answered, “unless maybe she didn’t write her address—and it doesn’t give the date.”

  Sam’s voice droned a kind of sleepy reply as he said, “I keep last year’s guests on the upside-down pages. That way I don’t get mixed up.”

  Big Sam stood and followed his mustache over to where we were. He looked at the register and at the name Poetry pointed out and said, “That’s the woman I was telling you about. She came in a taxi from Lincoln and didn’t seem to want to give her address—that’s why there isn’t any. I should have insisted on it, though,
because she left a briefcase in her cabin, and I could never send it to her.”

  Big Sam turned the guest book upside down, then right side up again, as if he himself was a little puzzled as to which was right, up or down. The phone rang then, and he went to answer it.

  Poetry and I bought a bottle of pop apiece, not wanting the rest of the gang to know what we’d been up to. We worked our way around behind the tent, slipped in, and pretty soon were in our sleeping bags—and also wide awake.

  “Why,” I whispered to him, “don’t you explain what’s on your mind—why you wanted the name and address?”

  His answer was: “Because I think the woman who left the note in the bottle could be the same one who got drunk in the Wild Horse Tavern at Aspen. When we get there, we’ll compare the handwriting we found in the bottle with the register at the Snow-slide Motel, and I bet they’ll be the same and the name’ll be the same, too. Then we’ll know she was here a year ago.”

  “But that won’t solve any mystery,” I protested. “We won’t know where she is now—not if she disappeared in a blizzard last New Year’s Eve.”

  Poetry’s whisper back through the dark was half yawn as he said, “We’ll solve that mystery when we get to it.”

  4

  Poetry, Circus, Little Jim, and I were in the tent, Little Jim’s parents in one of the camp cabins, and Big Jim and Dragonfly in the station wagon.

  For maybe twenty minutes my mind tossed around, trying to go to sleep, wrestling with the different memories I had of what had happened during the day. Once it seemed I was out in the river about a dozen rods from where our tent was pitched, wading along, testing the bottom with my feet, listening to the sound of the riffle singing downstream. I was hearing a chorus of small frogs trilling and every now and then the “gru-u-u-u-umph” of a grandfather bullfrog and the sighing of the wind in the evergreens that grew on the lawn near the motel office.