Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 19-24

by Paul Hutchens

  One thing he said before we got down to the Sundeck, where the gang was waiting, made me feel fine inside: “Bill, maybe I’d never have been a Christian at all if you hadn’t started me going to Sunday school a long time ago. Remember?”

  I remembered. If you want to, you can read all about it in the book called The Swamp Robber, which is the very first story there ever was about the Gang.

  Well, we still had the long ride ahead of us before we could go over to Little Nell Beginner’s Slope and the Wild Horse Canyon area to look for a flyaway hat. That was where it looked as if maybe it had landed after its high ride on the wind.

  It was Dragonfly who found the clue—stumbled over it, that is—and fell sprawling. He started a small avalanche with himself in the middle of it. When he came to a stop twenty feet or more from where he had started, he was lying in a tangled-up scramble, with the shoulder strap of a woman’s leather handbag caught on the toe of his right cowboy boot.

  He also was lying upside down on my stomach, which felt like it had a ton of weight on it instead of only eighty-seven pounds of spindle-legged boy.

  The small avalanche of rocks and dirt went tumbling on down the canyon we all had been exploring, looking for the lost hat.

  For a brain-whirling second, I forgot we were looking for a tan Stetson that had blown off a boy’s head two hours before. When I saw that weather-stained, scratched-up, woman’s hand-tooled handbag with the mariposa lilies carved on it, I wriggled myself from under Dragonfly, caught hold of the shoulder strap, rolled to a sitting position, held onto a root to keep from sliding farther downhill and let out a yell to all of us. “Look, gang! Look what I’ve found!”

  It took us all only a few minutes to get together to see what I had found, which Dragonfly said he had found because he had stumbled over it and it had accidentally caught on the toe of his boot.

  “Let’s see what’s in it!” Big Jim said, reaching for it.

  “Maybe it’ll have a hundred dollars in it,” Dragonfly said excitedly. “If it does have, it’ll be mine because I found it. ‘Finders keepers, losers weepers.’ And I’ll get the reward too!”

  “Finders are not keepers when it’s something like this.” Big Jim corrected Dragonfly’s quote. “You turn things like this over to the police and let them decide what to do with it.”

  Just hearing the word “police” made me realize we had something serious on our hands.

  Big Jim, who now had the leather handbag in his own hands and was holding it out of reach of any of the rest of us, had another idea. “It maybe belongs to some woman who lost it when she was taking a hike—a tourist who’s staying right now in some hotel in the area.”

  “Or maybe somebody attending the Music Festival,” Little Jim piped up to say.

  Circus, who had been quiet all this time, his jaw muscles working, his clear, dark eyes studying the scratches on the handbag, spoke up then and startled us by saying, “Those scratches were not made by accident. Those are tooth marks. Some wild animal has been gnawing on it!”

  I was surprised then to hear Dragonfly say, “The same wild animal that ate up the disappeared woman! That’s how come nobody ever found her!”

  It was such a startling idea that for a second it seemed Dragonfly’s imagination had given us part of the answer to the mystery. It’d be easy, I thought, for Connie Spruce, who had been drunk and had started home from the Wild Horse Tavern at midnight in a blinding blizzard, to wander off into the mountains, stumble along through the drifts, and a mountain lion or a pack of wolves find her.

  I hadn’t any sooner thought that, than I said it.

  We all acted pretty tense while our minds were imagining that kind of terrible story.

  Well, we couldn’t just sit there on the side of a canyon in a little huddle around a tooth-marked handbag, which was also covered with dirt stains and was pretty badly weathered. We couldn’t just keep on saying everything and doing nothing.

  So Big Jim, being the leader of the gang, unfastened the handbag’s leather strap and lifted the flap-over top. All our eyes were quick inside, looking at all the woman’s stuff that was there. Honest, if a boy carried that many different kinds of junk in his six or seven pockets, his mother would wonder, What on earth!

  9

  What a surprise. There we were in Wild Horse Canyon, a woman’s just-found, tooth-marked handbag in front of us, and in the billfold Big Jim had in his hand was a picture in full color of Cranberry Jones, one of the best-known cowboys in the whole country. My thoughts were as snarled as a boy’s fishing line after he’s just lost a fish and both pole and line are caught in a thicket of willows.

  “Hey!” Dragonfly burst out. “There she is! I’ll bet that’s her picture, herself!”

  His topsy-turvy way of saying what he’d just said didn’t seem to matter right then, because right in front of my eyes in another of the billfold’s windows was a full-color snapshot of a girl wearing a Western outfit, smiling. She also was on a horse. And the horse was a proud looking golden palomino with a creamy-white mane and tail!

  “Here’s an ID card!” Big Jim announced, and in a second my astonished eyes were seeing in another plastic window the words “Approved Identification Card.”

  Poetry’s squawky explanation in my ear then was “And look! It’s Connie Mae Spruce! The name is Connie Mae Spruce!”

  Now we’d seen the name three times. Poetry and I had, anyway—once on the camp register at Lazywild, again on the register at the Snow-slide, and now on an identification card in a weather-stained, tooth-marked leather handbag!

  Also, we’d heard the name last night while we were just outside the tent in our camp on the Roaring Fork!

  Poetry whispered in my ear something else then, saying, “The handwriting is the same!”

  And it was.

  Double what on earth! This was the fourth time we’d seen the very pretty handwriting: Once on the Lazywild register, once on the Snow-slide register, now on the identification card, and, maybe most important of all, on the note Circus had found in the whiskey bottle, the very sad note that said, “Alcohol is ruining my life … Someday it will kill me …”

  It looked as if the pieces of our jigsaw mystery were going to fit together. The name of the woman who owned the handbag, who had camped at Lazywild and left the note in the empty whiskey bottle, was Connie Mae Spruce. She had attended the Ski Festival last winter, learned to ski on the Little Nell T-Bar Beginner’s Slope, liked skiing so well she had dared the more dangerous runs, and then, one day, the morning of December 31, she had gotten a letter from somebody. That letter had made her very sad.

  She was so sad she had tried to drown her trouble in drink.

  All these thoughts flashed into and out of my mind in a split second, it seemed.

  I say out of my mind, because right then Big Jim let out a whistle and an exclamation and said, “And here’s a letter with Cranberry Jones’s name in the upper lefthand corner!”

  The postmark on the letter was Tucson, Arizona, and the date was December 28 of last year!

  Dragonfly cut in to say, “That’s it! That’s the letter she got that made her so sad she wanted to be a dead cat at the bottom of the creek, so she tried to drown herself in drink!”

  I glanced quick at Little Jim, and his face looked like somebody had stabbed him in the heart.

  I guess maybe each of us had a different idea in his mind. Circus, who has a hunter for a father and knows more about wildlife than any other boy in the Sugar Creek territory, had been examining the teeth marks on the handbag. In one place one of the mariposa lilies was almost completely scratched away.

  “It was a porcupine!” he suddenly burst out. “Porcupines are crazy for salt. They’ll chew on shovel handles, belts, saddles, old shoes—anything man’s hands have handled. But a porcupine couldn’t or wouldn’t ever eat a human being.”

  Dragonfly came out then with what was on his mind. “Let’s don’t forget what we came here for in the first place. L
et’s get going looking for my lost hat!”

  “Wait!” Big Jim’s face was pretty grim. “Let’s bring it to a vote to decide what to do with the handbag. If it belongs to the woman who disappeared last New Year’s Eve, we ought to give it to the police or the sheriff, and we ought to do it maybe right away. We can come back tomorrow for your hat.”

  “Yeah,” Poetry exclaimed to Dragonfly. “Your hat’s not so important, anyway.”

  That got him a surly look from Dragonfly, and there might have been a scuffle there on the steep canyon side, but Circus, who had a good mind, suggested, “Maybe we ought to give it to Cranberry Jones first and let him give it to the sheriff or the police. If he wrote her that letter, he’ll maybe know who she is—or was.”

  We quick brought it to a vote, and all of us except Little Jim voted yes to read the already opened letter to see if there was anything in it that would help us decide whether to give the handbag to Cranberry Jones first or to take it as quick as we could to the police.

  Little Jim said, “I think we ought to ask my folks what to do. That letter was private, and we don’t want to open and read a letter somebody wrote to a woman that’s maybe still alive somewhere—and it’s none of our business.”

  So, in spite of our majority vote, Big Jim closed the handbag, fastened its leather strap, and said, “All right then, let’s get going.”

  “What about my hat?” Dragonfly piped up. “I’m not leaving here till we find it.”

  Again Poetry told him, “I say it’s not so important. We’re on the trail of a mystery that could mean life or death.”

  But it was important to Dragonfly, so pretty soon, with Big Jim carrying Connie Mae Spruce’s handbag, we were working our way around the Little Nell T-Bar Slope and all over what seemed everywhere, looking for a flyaway hat.

  It was a little like exploring a giant-sized river bottom to see if it was safe for swimming, except that we were wading through thousands of mountain wild flowers, the names of most of which I didn’t know yet but was fast learning. Little Jim every now then let out a squeak and said that he had found a this or that flower.

  After about fifteen minutes more of looking, Dragonfly, off to my left and quite a ways below me, let out a war whoop, crying, “Here it is! I found it! It’s as good as new!” He came grinning and panting to where the rest of us were and bragged, “It’s the most important hat in the world, maybe.” He had it on at an angle that said he thought that he, himself, was important. Then with his hands near his hips, he set his thin jaw savagely, glared at Poetry, and demanded, “Draw, mister! Nobody can say what you said about my hat and get away with it! Draw!”

  But Poetry wouldn’t draw—not having anything to draw, anyway. “You can shoot me in the back if you’re coward enough to,” he said with a grin. He turned his back as a target, and that ended the feud between two good friends.

  Dragonfly did shoot Poetry with words, though, and what he said made good sense. “If I hadn’t had the hat on when we were on the chairlift, it wouldn’t have blown off, and we wouldn’t have had to come looking for it, and we wouldn’t have found the disappeared woman’s handbag—and if there’s any money in it, it’ll be ours. I say the hat is important!”

  Poetry turned like lightning and shot back, “Finders are not keepers!”

  It wouldn’t take us long to get to the Snow-slide, where my stomach had been telling me for quite awhile it wished I would hurry up and take it. Little Jim’s idea that we ought to give the handbag to his folks first still seemed right, so away we went as fast as we could.

  “Looks like it’s closer to go past the base station,” Big Jim said. “Come on. Step on it, gang.” With that, he broke into a run—a kind of short-of-breath run because the altitude around Aspen was about seven thousand feet above sea level and we weren’t used to it yet. We soon were all so short of breath we had to slow down to a walk.

  Because what we’d found could be very important, we did quite a lot of talking, each of us saying what was on his mind.

  Big Jim puffed to us an idea that showed what a good imagination he had. “You guys remember last night at camp devotions, Cranberry Jones asked us to ask God to take the hate out of his heart for somebody? All right then, I’ve got it figured out that Connie Spruce was a special friend of his. Somebody else wanted her for his friend. The two men had a fight, and that’s how Cranberry got that new L-shaped scar on his chin.”

  “What I can’t figure out,” Poetry panted beside me, “is how did her handbag get back there in Wild Horse Canyon if that’s who she is—or was—if she’s still alive.”

  “Sure,” Dragonfly put in. “Like I said, she got eaten up by a wild animal of some kind.”

  That’s when Poetry reached out his hand and stopped me. Then he stopped the rest of us with his voice, saying, “Wait a minute, everybody! Bill and I’ve got something to tell you. Something the whole gang’d better know.”

  I was ready to stop anyway. I had just that minute accidentally stepped on and crushed into the ground the purplish-red blossom of an inch-tall, ball-like, spiny-stemmed flower that Little Jim would want to look up in his book. It was different from any mountain flower I’d seen yet.

  “It’s a purple cactus,” the flower-guide carrying guy said the second he saw it. “I’ve been looking for one all afternoon.”

  “When you should have been looking for my hat,” Dragonfly barked. He had his hands at his hips again, ready to draw.

  Poetry started in then, telling the rest of the gang as fast as he could what he and I knew, beginning way back at Lazywild with the note in the whiskey bottle and hurrying on to the present minute where we all were with the handbag in our possession. Then he surprised me with some brand-new ideas I hadn’t even thought of myself. “Remember how Dragonfly’s hat blew off in the wind while he was high up on the chairlift?”

  “Sure,” Little Jim piped up.

  “All right,” Poetry went on, “if a hat could fall from the chairlift, couldn’t a woman accidentally drop a handbag while she was up there?”

  We were only a couple of hundred yards from the base station now, and I could hear the big motors humming. “I get it,” I said, as we all decided to hurry on. “Connie Spruce accidentally, when she was away up there somewhere, dropped her handbag. A porcupine found it and dragged it all the way down to Wild Horse Canyon where we found it.”

  Poetry quickly stooped, picked up a small colorless stone, tucked it into his pocket, saying, “Topaz,” then went on with his idea. “No, you don’t get it. Here’s what I mean. If a hat could blow off on a windy day, or a woman could accidentally drop her handbag, couldn’t the woman herself also lose her balance and fall off if she was riding a chairlift at midnight in a blinding blizzard, especially if she was drunk at the time!”

  I quick looked far ahead, up and up and still up, at the long line of sixty-feet-apart chairs on the long cables stretching from the base station toward Midway. The chairs, all empty now, swayed high over treetops and huge boulders and canyons and gullies. I cringed at the idea of anybody’s falling off one of the chairs.

  But Poetry’s idea seemed the best one we’d thought of yet. Maybe we had the mystery almost solved as to what had happened to the disappeared woman.

  Even Dragonfly forgot—for a few minutes, anyway—how important his hat was and what a famous Old West marshal his imagination had been telling him he was. He came out with a bright idea of his own. “Yeah, and the woman who left the note in the whiskey bottle at Lazy-wild and who left the ski magazine there—the one Poetry told us about—came here to the Ski Festival last winter. She’s the one that got drunk at the Wild Horse Tavern and started home in the blizzard. She got lost, stumbled into the base station, got on a chair, and started up. Her chair swung along, climbing higher and higher, and she was so cold she could hardly hold onto the bar in front of her—and didn’t know what she was doing, anyway. The wind was blowing so hard, and she just had sense enough to be scared, so she tried to jum
p out and maybe she did—or maybe she accidentally fell out, and her handbag with her, and landed in a snowdrift as big as a house, and she got buried deeper and deeper and finally went to sleep like people do when they’re about to freeze …”

  Dragonfly was talking along so fast and with such good sense for a change that not a one of us cut in to interrupt him. We let him race on to the end of his idea.

  “She finally froze to death and wolves or mountain lions or wildcats found her and ate her. Then in the spring there was an avalanche, and her skeleton with the handbag got carried all the way down to Wild Horse Canyon. And if the sheriff will send out a hunting party and dig all around close to where we found the handbag, they’ll find her bones.”

  Little Jim spoiled most of the story, though, by saying, “But they wouldn’t have the chairlift going at midnight in a blinding blizzard!”

  Right then, Big Jim took a quick glance at his wristwatch and ordered, “Come on, gang! We’ll be late for supper if we don’t hurry!”

  10

  I quick looked at my watch and was surprised to discover how late it was. We were supposed to be at the Snow-slide in only a few minutes, and we were still quite a ways from there!

  “How about letting me carry the handbag the rest of the way?” I asked Big Jim.

  “It’s my turn,” Dragonfly coaxed in a whiny voice, adding as a reason, “It was my hat that had sense enough to blow off and land in Wild Horse Canyon, and it was my new cowboy boot’s toe that caught on it. I want to walk right up to Cranberry Jones and hand it to him myself.”

  And that is how it happened we got to read Cranberry’s letter to Connie Mae Spruce.

  We were all swinging along, walking pretty fast toward the base station, which was on the way to the Snow-slide, when I heard a yell from Dragonfly. I looked quick in his direction and saw him sprawled on the ground, with the handbag and almost everything in it scattered all around him. That is, everything was scattered around him except the letter, which was in his right hand. That little rascal had opened the handbag, taken out the letter, and was sneak-reading it as he walked along. Not seeing where he was going, he had stumbled over an old aspen log and fallen head over heels.