Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 19-24

by Paul Hutchens

  I heard Cranberry Jones sigh heavily.

  I had to strain my ears to hear Little Jim’s pop answer, for right then Lindy called for Cranberry to come to the phone. I did manage to hear him say as they moved away from the fence Poetry and I were crouching behind, “Did it ever occur to you she might still be alive somewhere?”

  I also heard part of Cranberry’s answer, which started like this and faded out as they got farther away, “How could she be? Nobody could live in a blizzard like that. I’m sure if she were alive she’d want me to know it. She’d write and tell me and …”

  If only we could have heard more, but we’d heard that much, and it was a good thing we did. It started Poetry’s detective-like mind to working again. Suddenly he let out a gasp, grabbed me as if he was a mountain lion trying to kill a horse, and exclaimed, “I’ve got it! I’ve got it! Little Jim’s pop is right!”

  “Got what?” I exclaimed back.

  “Connie Mae Spruce is alive! The whiskey bottle we found at Lazywild proves it! Why didn’t I think of it before?”

  “Whiskey bottle proves what?” I asked, wondering how a whiskey bottle with a note in it, found in a pile of drift along a river back at a tourist camp in the middle of the United States, could prove Connie Spruce, who had fallen from a chairlift in a blizzard and frozen to death—how could it prove she was alive?

  But I didn’t have as keen a mind on things like that as Poetry, which I can prove by his astonishing answer. “Wasn’t that pile of drift at least a year old, washed there from upstream somewhere?”

  “Sure,” I said, “what of it?”

  “What of it!” he exclaimed, scoffing at how slow I was to understand. “That whiskey bottle with the note in it was a new bottle! The label was still on it, and it wasn’t even dirty! It hadn’t been washed there from somewhere upstream! She put it there herself the week before we camped there. She’s still alive! I know it!”

  “But,” I protested, “she camped there a year ago this summer! Her name was on one of the upside-down pages. Remember?”

  That seemed to stump Poetry for a second. But he quick had an answer. “That depends on whether that page was upside down or whether the guest book was.”

  Right then Little Jim’s mother called to us. They were ready to drive us to our camp on Roaring Fork where the gang was going to stay until after the concert.

  I was surprised to find everybody already in the station wagon, waiting.

  “Where on earth have you been?” Big Jim was a little cross. “Remember our rule about staying together? We don’t want any of you little kids getting lost!” That was a friendly insult we knew better than to get angry at, as it would have proved we were little in our own minds.

  It was going to be fun being all alone in camp, sitting around the fire, telling stories, making plans for the rest of our vacation, talking over all the excitement of the day so far.

  I wondered, as we drove past the place where yesterday Little Jim had called out about the white butterflies, whether Poetry would decide to tell the rest of the gang what we thought—what we’d almost decided back under the Hello Tree—that Connie Mae Spruce was honest-to-goodness-for-sure still alive!

  Pretty soon we were there and alone, had a good fire going in the safe place the forest service had shown us, not more than a hundred yards from the Roaring Fork and maybe only one hundred feet from an abandoned log cabin an old settler had built there years and years and years ago.

  It was one of the finest feelings I’d ever had—lying on my sleeping bag, enjoying the warmth of the fire, which felt good in the cold mountain night air, looking up at the stars and the new moon, dreaming about the family who had lived here long ago, wondering how many children they had had, and how dangerous it had been with wolves and mountain lions in the mountains roundabout.

  I was jarred out of my reverie by the sound of an engine on the road leading to our campground. Then a car with four lights turned into the lane and came toward us, its headlamps almost blinding me.

  The car’s third light was a powerful spot, and its fourth was a flashing red light on top.

  “Police!” Circus exclaimed.

  I rolled over and up to a sitting position. Not being used to police cars stopping at our house back at Sugar Creek, I felt my muscles tightening, my jaw setting, and my nerves trembling for wondering, What on earth?

  A few seconds later the car was all the way up to where we were, as close as it would be safe for a gasoline motor to come to an open fire, and a gruff voice called, “You boys all alone here?”

  Big Jim answered that we were, and the same voice asked, “Seen anything of a man on a horse?” Now the spotlight was sweeping the whole area, shining toward the river and the abandoned cabin and far back into the roundabout trees.

  Dragonfly piped up from the other side of the fire, “What’s Cranberry Jones done?”

  I looked across to him and to my surprise he was standing, his Stetson at a savage angle, his hands near his hips. He was glaring as well as blinking, and his thin little jaw was set fiercely as though he was an Old West marshal. Any second now I expected him to explode with a bark, demanding, “Draw, mister! Draw!”

  The voice from the car answered Dragonfly’s question, saying, “Just making a routine investigation. Are you the boys who found a handbag this afternoon?”

  “I’m the boy,” Dragonfly answered proudly. “Some bozo named Charlie tried to make us give it to him. He chased me all around the chairlift office trying to get it away from me, but I passed to Bill and he ran ker-smack into Cranberry Jones and bowled him over, and we gave the handbag to him. He’s got it now.”

  What Dragonfly had just said, excited and bragging, didn’t seem to interest the police. They raced their engine a few seconds, then the one with the gruff voice said, “Jones’ll be riding in after a while. Tell him we have news for him and to wait here till we get back.”

  The car with the four lights drove away, and we were alone again to think and to talk over all the excitement. This might be the new West but there certainly was a lot of the Old West in it. I had a creeping feeling that somebody might be watching and listening to us from the old cabin on whose log face the leaping flames were making weird shadows right that minute.

  The police hadn’t been gone more than a few seconds before there was the snap of a twig behind our tent, and a man’s voice whispering to us from the shadows.

  “Hey, fellows! It’s me, Charlie Paxton! I want to talk with you!”

  12

  We didn’t have time to say yes or no, whether or not we wanted to talk with the base station engineer who had acted so strangely in the afternoon, for there he stood, blinking a little at the brightness of the fire.

  Poetry mumbled in my ear, “He’s wearing his gun!”

  I’d already seen his wide belt with the leather holster hanging from it and, in the holster, the walnut grip of a pistol shining in the firelight.

  Behind us was the roaring of the Roaring Fork, and all around and above us the soughing of the wind in the evergreens that circled the clearing where our tent was pitched. But louder than any of the sounds nature was making was the pounding of my heartbeat in my ears. It seemed as I looked at Charlie’s grim face, and as my eyes strayed to the log cabin behind him, that maybe he’d been hiding there all the time, listening to everything we’d said to each other. Maybe the police had been looking for him too, as well as for Cranberry.

  It certainly was a tense minute, as we waited to see or hear or have a part in what was going to happen next—if anything was.

  Nothing did happen for a time, not until we’d talked a little while with Charlie. He seemed nervous and worried and scared.

  “You boys may think I acted strange this afternoon, the way I tried to get the handbag away from you. But I’d seen it or one like it before. It looked just like one that belonged to one of my ski students last winter. You want to tell me what was in it? Any identification?”

  Dragonfly a
nswered for us. “It had Cranberry Jones’s picture in it. On his horse. And a woman’s picture, on his horse. That’s why we gave it to him instead of you.”

  Charlie nodded grimly. “She was registered at his motel. She’s the woman you boys maybe know about who disappeared last New Year’s Eve in a blizzard. The police all over the country’ve been looking for her. I thought maybe there might be a clue of some kind in the handbag—some hint as to what might have happened to her.”

  Charlie raised his head then, listening, and a scared look came over his face. His right hand moved toward his holster.

  Right then is when the thump-thump-thump of the heartbeat in my ears changed to the thuddety-thud-thud of a horse’s galloping feet. Then I saw a man on horseback swing into the lane and come loping toward the firelit circle where we all were.

  I saw the reflected light on the horse’s eyes first, then the horse and the rider on it—and it was Cranberry Jones on his beautiful palomino.

  Pal hadn’t any sooner come to a stop than Cranberry was off and in full view in the firelight. Charlie Paxton—whose name had been on the corner of the ski magazine we’d found at Lazywild, and who had tried so hard to get the handbag away from us in the afternoon, who was a scoundrel, a cheat and an ungodly wretch—was now face to face with the cowboy whose voice I’d heard many times in Old West radio programs and whose six-shooter on those programs had shot many a rustler or bank robber. These two men, who I knew were enemies, were going to have a showdown right in the middle of our campfire light!

  This, my imagination was screaming to me, was going to be the real thing! I, myself, in actual life was going to see an honest-to-goodness-for-sure Old West duel. This wasn’t any little old pretend radio or TV story. This was for real!

  Both men’s faces were set. Both stood stiff-legged, reminding me again of two Sugar Creek dogs standing nose to nose just before flying into a fierce, fast fang fight.

  I looked quick to see if Cranberry Jones was wearing his gun, and I couldn’t see any, but the way he was holding his right hand close to his chest told me he had one in a shoulder holster under his jacket.

  I don’t know why I thought what I thought right then, but even while we were in the middle of what any second could be a quick-draw duel, I remembered last night. At about this same time, Little Jim’s father was asking the One who had made all the people in the world to help more people love other people. It seemed it was going to be hard for God to answer that prayer. Any second now, there might be a flash of fire from a pistol, and one of the grim-faced men would be dead. Or else two guns would spit bullets at the same time, and two men would be dead!

  Right then Cranberry Jones’s voice fired a round of bulletlike words. “I reckon this is the showdown, Charlie. I don’t know what has happened to Connie, whether she is alive or not. All I know is that you were seen last New Year’s Eve, midnight, leaving the Wild Horse Tavern right after she did. You caught up with her at the church corner. You know, Charlie, and I know, and the town and the whole country knows, she never reached her room at the Snow-slide. I’m asking you once more—what did you do with her?”

  Hearing that, I got the feeling that Cranberry Jones was like Mixy, our black and white cat, stalking a field mouse in our south pasture—only this time the field mouse could fight back.

  Charlie Paxton’s voice had a tremble in it, but his words were pretty fierce. “Don’t force me to do something I don’t want to, Cran! Stop! Don’t come one inch closer!”

  I hadn’t noticed Cranberry coming nearer until Charlie shouted that. Then I saw that the two men were at least two feet closer to each other than they had been.

  Now it was Charlie Paxton who was our old cat. Cranberry Jones was only another neighbor cat, and pretty soon there would be a fierce, fur-flying fang fight.

  Jones’s answer was: “I said a minute ago, Charlie, This is the showdown! The boys’ finding Connie’s handbag and the way you acted there this afternoon proves you do know more than you’ve told anybody!”

  As the gang waited, tense and cringing, Charlie Paxton began to talk.

  “I’ve told you a dozen times. She broke away from me out there in the snow and ran toward the mountains. I hurried after her, stumbled into the blind alley behind the church, and lost her.

  “I fought my way through the storm to the Snow-slide, thinking she might have made it home, but she hadn’t. That’s when I decided to try the chairlift office. We’d had a lot of talks there that week. It took me almost a half hour to get there, the storm was so terrible.

  “When I finally reached the door, it was open, the motors were on and the chairlift going. I couldn’t remember turning it off. I’d been drinking a little myself—a little more than usual because of the weather forecast. The blizzard was supposed to last all the next day and maybe longer, so I didn’t have to worry about having a clear mind. I—”

  Cranberry Jones’s savage voice cut in right there, accusingly. “And you gave her a drink! You knew she was an alcoholic, that she didn’t dare touch a drop or she’d be off again on a binge. You knew she was trying to quit and hadn’t had a drink for months and was winning the battle against the stuff!”

  I, Bill Collins, cringing beside Charlie Paxton, could feel the black wrath in Cranberry Jones’s voice and the hate-fire burning in his heart.

  Charlie looked a little like a caught mouse, I thought. His right hand was still close to his holster as he hurried to finish what he wanted to say.

  “I shut off the motors, then I went back to town to look for her. And that’s all I knew till the next morning, when I found her purple scarf out by the lift where many a time I’d seen her slide into the chair when it moved past. That’s when I knew what had happened—or thought I knew. I’d left the chairlift going, and Connie, not knowing what she was doing, had swung on and gone up into that wild blizzard. When I stopped the motors, she must have been stranded up there somewhere between heaven and earth and had frozen to death!

  “I was afraid to tell the whole truth. I hoped and hoped all the rest of the winter and spring and up until today that she’d turn up alive somewhere. But now I know there’s no use hoping. The handbag proves what happened to her. Tomorrow they’ll start searching all over again, and this time they’ll find her. Wait! Let me finish. You’ve got to believe me, Cran. I’ve lived with this all these months, lying awake nights, fighting against the awful fear and guilt at what I’d done. But now I know. I’ve murdered her just as truly as if I’d taken her life deliberately. I …”

  All this time Charlie had been standing with his hand close to his side, as if any second he would use on Cranberry Jones the blue lightning he had in his holster. I couldn’t tell if he was really sorry for what he was to blame for, or if he was just trying to keep Cranberry from shooting him. It seemed he was only scared that what he’d done would cost him his life.

  Maybe I was a little more sure than any of the rest of us that he would use his gun—or maybe I was the only one who was keeping an eye on the twitching fingers of his right hand. Any second now, I thought, something violent might happen. Charlie was like a lit firecracker with a spitting fuse racing toward the powder.

  And then, right in front of my eyes, there was a lightninglike movement toward his holster, and that’s when I screamed bloody murder to Cranberry Jones. “Look out! He’s going to shoot!”

  Talk about things happening fast! At the same second—or maybe even sooner—there was a flash of fire and a deafening explosion.

  When what few wits I had gathered themselves together and I was able to think straight in all that whirlwind of excitement, there were three people on the ground only a few yards from our campfire—Charlie Paxton, Cranberry Jones, and Big Jim, our powerful-muscled leader.

  I’d had a fleeting glimpse of Big Jim making a flying leap for Charlie’s knees like a tackle tackling a quarterback. I’d also seen Cranberry Jones duck, as if trying to dodge a bullet. Both of them were diving toward Paxton just as the blue li
ghtning from Charlie’s holster spit fire from its muzzle and that thunderous explosion shattered the silence of the mountain night.

  For a few seconds the three on the ground in the firelight lay with their arms and legs all tangled up. Cranberry was on his knees, holding Charlie’s pistol wrist with both hands, trying to keep him from shooting again. Charlie was grunting and struggling and exclaiming and trying to get away. Then he began to scream hoarsely, fighting like a wildcat to get his pistol hand free.

  Big Jim was holding onto Charlie’s legs for dear life, also grunting and with a set face.

  It seemed I ought to hurl myself into the middle of all that writhing, grunting, sweating scramble, yet for some reason I stood frozen, scared and all mixed up in my mind.

  13

  If I had been in there holding onto one of Charlie Paxton’s legs, maybe he wouldn’t have been able to do what he did do right then. He gave his powerful body a heave, kicked Big Jim’s grip loose, rolled over and onto his feet, and was free!

  I was so close to him I could have reached out and grabbed the pistol in his hand, but remembering one of my dad’s favorite expressions, “It’s better to have good sense than it is to be brave,” I stayed stock-still, scared but trying to use what little good sense I had.

  Right then, Circus called out, “Somebody’s coming!”

  It was the police car again, its red light flashing and its spotlight searching our camping area, lighting up the shrubs, the old cabin, the roundabout trees.

  Well, you never saw a man move faster in your life. Charlie Paxton whirled, grabbed me around the waist, jabbed his blue lightning into my back, and growled to me, “Don’t make a move or you’re a dead boy!” And for some reason it seemed it was the right time to have good sense instead of being brave, which I wasn’t anyway.

  I felt myself being pulled backward, pulled and half dragged toward the abandoned cabin.