Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 19-24

by Paul Hutchens

  After that came the calf roping, and last of all was to be the Brahman bull riding. Well, that fierce old Brahman that came storming out of the chute with Cranberry on his back was faster and angrier than the savage red bull that had gotten into the fight with my cousin Wally’s dog, Alexander the Coppersmith, in the story The Bull Fighter.

  The bull Cranberry Jones was riding had a hump like a camel’s hump, except that it wasn’t in the center of its back but was forward, near its shoulders. The snorting beast was wilder than the wild horse he had been on.

  It took that Brahman bull only a jiffy and a half to throw Cranberry right over his head. My favorite cowboy hero went flying through the air with the greatest of ease and in a few split seconds landed in a dusty, tangled-up sprawl about ten feet in front of the bull’s lowered head.

  With his head still down, the Brahman stood still for a few seconds, then started on a horns-first dash straight for Cranberry, who by this time was on his feet but staggering groggily around as if he didn’t know where he was.

  The crowd broke loose with yells, screaming for him to get out of the way or it’d really be sudden death. In my mind’s eye I was seeing what might happen any second. I was cringing and yelling and also praying, although I don’t remember what I said. But I was asking the One who had made the mountains to save Cranberry Jones’s life.

  Just then, two rodeo clowns, who had been waiting for something like this to happen, rushed in to distract the bull’s attention. The snorting beast stopped, stood still again, staring, then whirled off after one of the clowns—and Cranberry was saved. With two clowns horsing around in front of him, the bull got mixed up in his mind, and that part of the rodeo was over.

  Little Jim’s parents had arranged for us all to go to an afternoon’s concert at three o’clock in the big tent in the meadow—that, as you know, was one reason we’d come West in the first place. But I could hardly wait till five o’clock, when we were to go to the Snow-slide Motel to see Cranberry Jones—and for another special reason that only Poetry and I knew.

  I won’t take time now to tell you all about the first concert except to let you know what happened to Little Jim while we were listening to a thirteen-year-old Czechoslovakian girl tear the piano apart and put it together again, using all eighty-eight keys to do it. The best boy pianist in all Sugar Creek territory got a faraway expression in his eyes as though he was seeing a future with stars in it, and he whispered to me, “Maybe I’ll have to miss some of the gang meetings after we get back home. I might be too busy.”

  “Doing what?” Dragonfly, who was on the other side of him, asked in a whisper, while the thirteen-year-old girl was still thundering up and down the keys like Sudden Death in a rodeo arena.

  Little Jim’s explanation startled me and also made me proud of him when he answered, “If I’m going to learn to master the piano like that by the time I’m thirteen, I’ll have to get down to brass tacks. I can’t spend so much time just playing.”

  “Down to black and white keys, you mean,” Dragonfly answered.

  And Little Jim said, “Sh! Keep still!” I could see his lips were pressed together tightly and his small jaw was set, as with eyes glued to the stage he listened for all he was worth.

  As the girl played, I looked over the heads of hundreds of people to the place where our station wagon was parked. I noticed somebody had fastened onto the front bumper a large green and black sign that said:

  RIDE THE ASPEN CHAIRLIFT,

  THE WORLD’S LONGEST

  One of the first things Little Jim had done when we got to Aspen was to buy out of his allowance a book called Flowers of Mountain and Plain. He had already found six different kinds of wild flowers in the meadow and marked the place in the book where it described them. One of the prettiest was the blue columbine. Even while he sat beside me with tense mind and shining eyes, his book was opened to the very first color plate, and I was looking down at the graceful blue and white blossom that is the state flower of Colorado. I thought how much it was shaped like the daffodils that grew along the orchard fence south of the cherry tree back on our farm.

  The Czechoslovakian girl was still galloping up and down the keyboard of the Steinway piano, but for a few seconds I was back at Sugar Creek. I was thinking about my grayish-brown-haired mom and wishing she could come out here sometime and stay a few weeks without having to work a single day. I might not get to spend so much time playing with the gang myself when I got back, I thought. I could maybe get a job and earn enough to help Dad pay for a vacation for both of them.

  Poetry was more interested in minerals than flowers. He had already collected a dozen different kinds to take back for his collection, which he kept in a special place in their basement room with his butterflies.

  Big Jim, who might be a banker someday, had noticed how many For Sale signs there were on old houses and even on motels. He wondered how much money a man could make buying a house in the winter and selling it in the summer, when there were a lot of tourists—or else buying it in the summer and selling it in the winter when there were hundreds and hundreds of skiers here from all over the world who, next year, might like a place to live without having to pay so much rent.

  Circus was enjoying the music. He had a good singing voice and had been taking lessons back at Sugar Creek from Little Jim’s mother.

  After the concert, I heard Circus sigh as if he had an ache of some kind in his heart. I remembered the secret he had told me back at Lazywild Camp and guessed what he might be thinking. Later, when we passed an old weather-beaten, abandoned church with broken-down front steps and tall grass, weeds, and wild flowers growing all over the lawn, he sighed again. I didn’t ask him anything, but I knew what was in his mind—and in his hurt heart.

  Dragonfly still seemed interested in cowboys and guns. He kept his hands close to his hips all the time, ready at a minute’s notice to fire an imaginary bullet into some rustler or horse thief or to capture a stagecoach robber singlehanded.

  “Where are the stagecoaches?” he wanted to know when we came out of the tent and all of us worked our way through the scattering crowd to our station wagon.

  “Goofy!” Poetry answered him. “That was in the Old West. This is the new West. They shoot each other with music nowadays.”

  All Poetry got for his bright remark was a scowl. I’d started to say, “A scowl and a sneeze,” but all of a sudden I remembered that Dragonfly had stopped sneezing and wheezing almost as soon as we got to the high altitude and the breezes came over the mountains.

  “Can we go on the chairlift this afternoon?” Little Jim asked his father, and we couldn’t. Not until tomorrow morning, when we’d have plenty of time to ride all the way up to the top of Ajax Mountain. We’d plan it so we could get there about noon, and we’d have lunch up there at the place called Sundeck.

  It was already almost five o’clock and time for us to meet Cranberry Jones at the Snow-slide Motel.

  6

  Riding toward town in the station wagon, we drove slowly down a back road and past an aspen grove Little Jim’s mother wanted to see.

  All of a sudden Little Jim let out a yell. “Wait! Stop! Look at all those white butterflies! Hundreds and hundreds of ’em!”

  He had yelled “Stop!” so excitedly that his mother, who was driving, slammed on the brakes. The car stopped so fast that I slid off the backseat onto the floor.

  “What on earth!” Little Jim’s father exclaimed at his son. His mother exclaimed the same thing at the same time. It was a duet without any music in it.

  Little Jim ignored their disgust at him and pointed toward the small aspen grove, exclaiming, “Right over there! See ’em! Hundreds and hundreds of white butterflies!”

  We looked, but all I could see was about eighty-seven one-inch-in-diameter creamy-white mariposa lilies.

  “Those aren’t butterflies!” Dragonfly disagreed disgustedly.

  Little Jim giggled then and said, “Anybody who knows anything about maripo
sa lilies knows that the Spanish name mariposa means butterfly.” He settled down then, his eyes on his flower guide, took a pencil from his shirt pocket and marked down the date.

  In the breeze, the mariposa lilies did look like hundreds of white butterflies fluttering above the grass and the other shorter-stemmed flowers.

  In a little while we were stopping in the parking lot at the Snow-slide Motel and in another little while were behind it, where there was a large outdoor swimming pool the very shape of a mariposa lily. At one end was a sign that said THE WORLD FAMOUS MARIPOSA POOL.

  There was a grassy border all around the pool and, every few yards, outdoor lounging furniture and tables with chairs around them.

  Right then, from a bathhouse at the other end of the pool, came a bronze, muscular man in a swimming outfit, and it was Cranberry Jones himself.

  “Look!” Dragonfly exclaimed. “There he is! There’s the horse thief!”

  He swung into action. His six-shooters were out, and he was running and shouting, “Bang! Bang! Bang!” in the direction of the king of the cowboys.

  “Goofy!” Poetry cried and struck out after the spindle-legged rascal. He grappled with him to stop him from making a big fool out of a little one, and they both went down in a tangled-up scramble in the grass not more than four feet from the pool.

  It could have been quite a wrestling match—and would have been if the pool hadn’t been so close and if Cranberry Jones hadn’t been so quick on his feet. In a flash he was after them, and in another flash he had the two young steers pinned to the ground, one with each hand.

  He had saved the boys from the pool, all right, but not Dragonfly’s hat. There it was now, six or ten feet out in the water, upside down and floating.

  In a split second Cranberry Jones was in after it. “This the hat I trampled at the rodeo?” he asked as he shook out the water and brought it to Dragonfly.

  You might have thought Dragonfly would have been angry, but he wasn’t. He reached for the out-of-shape, soaking-wet hat, and said proudly, “Thanks, thanks a million!”

  “Just wait till I get toweled and dressed, and we’ll take your hat over to the cleaners—have to hurry before they close,” Cranberry Jones said. Then he plunged into the water again, swimming with a very fast crawl stroke toward the other end of the pool and the bathhouse where his clothes were. I thought as he sped along that he was as good at wrestling the waves he was making as he was a stubborn steer in a rodeo arena.

  Just then a hostess in a Western outfit came up to Little Jim’s father and said, “We start serving in thirty minutes. Your table is over there by the Hello Tree.”

  I looked in the direction her hand had gestured, and there were three tables under three different kinds of trees.

  “The tree whose leaves are waving hello,” the smiling hostess explained. “My brother calls the trembling aspen the Hello Tree. Here, let me show you.” She led the way along the footpath that bordered the pool to a table near a white aspen.

  “Notice the leaf stems,” she said. “They’re soft and flexible and flat, not at all like most leaf stems, which are stiff. These are like little narrow ribbons. When there is a breeze, the leaves quake, or tremble, like tiny heart-shaped green flags waving hello. You can also hear them talking. Listen!”

  We listened, and the sound in the breeze was like a boy crumpling a newspaper.

  “The Indians call the trembling aspen ‘noisy leaf,’” she said.

  It took Cranberry Jones only a few minutes to towel and dress in his cowboy outfit, and soon he was ready to take Dragonfly’s hat to leave it for cleaning and blocking. “We’ll ride over on Pal,” he said to Dragonfly.

  Soon we were watching him swing Dragonfly up on his beautiful palomino, swing himself up behind him, and lope away toward town.

  “What a brother!” the hostess said and stood looking after the palomino with Dragonfly and her brother, Cranberry Jones, on it.

  Well, it was still fifteen minutes before they would start serving, and we had to wait for Dragonfly to come back before we could even order. It certainly was an interesting place, so Western and different from any we had seen before.

  Poetry and I watched our chance, and a little later we were alone near the bathhouse. He whispered to me, “Let’s wade in and all the way across, exploring the bottom with our feet. We might find a gunnysack with a woman in it.”

  It was a ridiculous idea, of course, but it was his way of letting me know what was still on his mind. The water in the pool was so clear you could see the bottom everywhere.

  “Follow me,” he whispered, which I did, and in a jiffy we were in the reception room of the Snow-slide Motel.

  As he had done when we were at Lazywild back in the middle of the United States, Poetry asked the desk clerk politely, “Do you mind if we look through your register? Maybe you’ve had a few guests from our hometown.”

  There was such an innocent expression on Poetry’s face, and such a polite smile in his ducklike voice, that the extra pretty lady clerk answered, “There just might be. What is your hometown?”

  When Poetry told her, she came to life, saying, “Then you’re the boys who are Cran’s dinner guests tonight!”

  In a minute Poetry and I were glancing through the pages of the guest book, looking for a very beautiful, very familiar handwriting—familiar because we had studied the note from the bottle maybe a dozen times since we’d left Lazywild.

  The lady desk clerk was busy watering plants in a small greenhouse just off the office so she didn’t hear Poetry’s whistle or his excited whisper when he said, “Here it is. I knew it’d be here.”

  I looked where his finger was pointing. Sure enough, the handwriting was the same and also the name—the name that had been on the register at Lazywild—“Connie Mae Spruce.”

  “And here’s the date,” Poetry whispered, and there was mystery in his voice. “That’s the same week the blonde woman walked out of the Wild Horse Tavern, staggered down the street through a blinding blizzard, and was never heard from again—and her body was never found.”

  There was a commotion at the office entrance then, and it was the gang looking for us to come out and get our orders taken for dinner. It wasn’t until later that Poetry and I got a chance to talk about our mystery and to wonder to each other what to do about it. We’d have to decide sooner or later whether to tell the rest of the gang what we knew.

  Just as we left the office, Poetry whispered to me, “I’ll bet if we can find that Charlie Paxton, whose name was on the ski magazine, we’ll really know something.”

  Dinner under the Hello Tree, with Cranberry Jones at the table with us, was different from any experience I had ever had. He and Little Jim’s pop did a lot of visiting about different things. One of the most important pieces of news I managed to hear, but which I already knew, was that the Snow-slide Motel belonged to Cranberry Jones and his sister Lindy, the very friendly hostess who had told us aspen leaves were like heart-shaped hands waving a friendly welcome to everyone.

  All the time, though, it seemed there was a sad expression on Cranberry’s face as he and Mr. Foote talked about the Old West, how different it was from the new, and how in the old days the way to get rid of wickedness in the country was to shoot or hang all the wicked men.

  “Are things different today because men don’t hate as much as they used to?” Little Jim’s mother asked. “Or is it because people in the new West don’t do such wicked things?”

  Again I saw a shadow pass across Cranberry’s face, and it was then I noticed for the first time the little L-shaped scar on the right side of his chin and wondered what had caused it.

  “No, I’d say men don’t steal so many horses nor rustle so many cattle, but they still break hearts and kill by degrees,” he said and sighed.

  The way he said what he said made it seem he was talking about somebody he knew—and didn’t like.

  After dinner we strolled around town in twos and threes. In a little while we
would drive out to our camp on Roaring Fork River and turn in for a good night’s rest before taking the chairlift in the morning to the top of Ajax Mountain—“the longest chairlift in the whole world,” Dragonfly kept reminding us.

  Poetry and I did a little secret talking about our special mystery when for a few minutes we were alone and looking in the display window of an art shop. I wasn’t interested in the different kinds of pottery except that I kept seeing things through my mother’s eyes. If she were here, she would have a hard time to keep from going in and buying something for our house and for the other Sugar Creek women to talk about and want if they saw it.

  Poetry exploded me out of my back-home world by an easy punch in my ribs with his elbow, saying, “There comes somebody out of Wild Horse Tavern! Uh-oh! He’s staggering like he’s had one too many.”

  Remembering what I’d heard Dad say quite a few times, I answered Poetry. “If he’s had one drink, he’s had one too many.”

  Even from as far away as we were, I could see the man’s Western shirt had what Mom would call caballero cuffs, and on its front was a design that looked like a desert cactus.

  From the art shop we strolled down a side street toward the roller-skating rink, where the rest of the gang would be waiting. It was like walking through a town full of music. Piano, violin, brass instruments, and voices were chasing different tones up and down the scale. Everywhere, all kinds of other instruments were going like a house afire. It was music students, maybe, practicing their lessons or for tomorrow’s concerts.

  “Look!” Poetry said. “There’s a cleaning place. I’ll bet that’s where Dragonfly’s hat is.” The sign in the window said Western Hats, a Specialty. A bright light was on in the back, and somebody was busy working. The only light in the front was a small one over the cash register.

  Seeing the lone bulb above the cash register, Poetry remarked, “People in the new West will steal, too, or they wouldn’t put a light there.”