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_THE SUGAR CREEK GANG GOES NORTH_
by
PAUL HUTCHENS
[Illustration]
Published by
_Scripture Press_
BOOK DIVISION
434 South Wabash Ave.
Chicago 5, Ill.
_The Sugar Creek Gang Goes North_
Copyright, 1947, by
Paul Hutchens
All rights in this book are reserved. No part may be reproduced in
any manner without the permission in writing from the author, except
brief quotations used in connection with a review in a magazine or
newspaper.
Printed in the United States of America
1
I guess I never did get tired thinking about all the interesting and
exciting things which had happened to the Sugar Creek Gang when we’d
gone camping far up in the North. One of the happiest memories was of
the time when Poetry, who is the barrel-shaped member of our gang,
and I were lost out in the forest, and while we were trying to get
unlost we met a very cute little brown-faced Indian boy whose name was
Snow-in-the-face, and his big Indian brother whose name was Eagle Eye.
Little Snow-in-the-face was really the cutest little Indian boy I had
ever seen; in fact, he was the first one I’d ever really seen up real
close. I kept thinking about him and wishing that the whole Sugar Creek
Gang could go again up into that wonderful country which everybody
calls the Paul Bunyan Playground and see how Little Snow-in-the-face
was getting along, and how his big brother’s Indian Sunday school was
growing, which, as you know, they were having every Sunday in an old
railroad coach, which they’d taken out into the forest and fixed up
into a church. Say, I never had any idea that we would get to go back
so soon, in fact, the very next summer after we’d been there the summer
before.
But here I go telling you about how we happened to get to go, and how
quick we started, and all the exciting things that happened on the way
and after we got there, and especially _after_ we got there. Boy oh
boy! it was real fun, and also very exciting--especially that night
when we ran kersmack into a kidnapper mystery, and some of us who were
mixed up in it were almost half scared half to death. Imagine a very
dark night with only moonlight enough to make things look spooky, and
queer screaming sounds echoing through the forest and over the lake,
and then finding the kidnapped girl all wrapped in an Indian blanket
with a handkerchief stuffed into her mouth and--but that’s getting
ahead of the story, and I’d better not tell you how it happened until
I get to it, ’cause it might spoil the story for you, and I hope you
won’t start turning the pages of this book real fast and read the
mystery first, ’cause that wouldn’t be fair.... Don’t you dare skip
even one page. You just keep reading along until you get there.
Anyway, this is how we were going to get to go. Some of the Sugar Creek
Gang of us were lying in the long mashed-down grass, in a level place
at the top of the steep incline not very far from where the hill goes
down real steep to the spring at the bottom where my pop is always
sending me to get a pail of real cold fresh water for us to drink at
our house. We were all of us lying in different directions, talking
and laughing and yawning and pretending to be sleepy, also some of us
were tumbling around a little and making a nuisance of ourselves to
each other. Most of us had long stems of blue grass in our mouths and
were chewing on the ends, and all of us were feeling swell. I had my
binoculars in my hand and up to my eyes looking around at different
things.
First, I watched a red squirrel, high up in a big sugar tree, lying
flat and lazy on the top of a gray branch like he was taking a
two-o’clock-in-the-afternoon sun bath, which was what time of day it
was that Saturday afternoon. I had been lying on my back, looking up
at the squirrel, then I rolled over and got onto my knees and focused
the binoculars on Sugar Creek. Sugar Creek’s face was very lazy, on
account of that being a wide part of the creek, and the water moved
very slowly, hardly moving, and was as quiet as Pass Lake had been up
in Minnesota in the Paul Bunyan country, on a very quiet day. There
were little whitish patches of different shaped specks of white foam
floating along on the kinda brownish blue water. While I was looking
at Sugar Creek with its big wide quiet face, and dreaming about a big
blue-watered lake up North, I saw some V-shaped waves coming out across
the creek from the opposite shore. The sharp-pointed end of the V was
coming straight toward the spring and bringing the rest of the V along
with it. I knew right away it was a muskrat and it was swimming right
straight toward our side of the creek. Looking at the brownish muskrat
with the binoculars made it seem like it was very close, and I could
see its pretty chestnut brown fur. Its head was broad and kinda blunt,
and I knew if I could have seen its tail it would have been about half
as long as the muskrat, and deeper than it was wide, and that it would
have scales on it, and only a few scattered hairs. I quick grabbed a
big rock and quick threw that rock as straight as I could and as hard,
right straight toward the acute angle of the long moving V which was
still coming across the creek toward us.
And would you believe it? I’m not always such a good shot with a rock,
but this time that rock went straight toward where the muskrat was
headed for, and by the time the rock and the muskrat got to the same
place at the same time, the rock went kerswishety-splash right on the
broad blunt head of the _musquash_, which is another and kinda fancy
name for a muskrat.
Circus, the acrobat in our gang, was the only one of the gang who saw
me do what I had done. He yelled out to me in a voice that sounded like
a circus-barker’s voice, “Atta boy, Bill! Boy oh boy, that was a swell
shot! I couldn’t have done any better myself!”
“Better than _what_?” nearly all the rest of the gang woke up and asked
him at the same time.
“Bill killed an _Ondatra zibethica_,” Circus said, which is the Latin
name for a muskrat,--Circus’ pop being a trapper, and Circus having a
good animal book in his library. “Socked it in the head with a rock.”
Everybody looked out toward Sugar Creek to the place where the rock had
socked the _Ondatra_ in the head, and where the two forks of the V were
getting wider and wider, almost disappearing into nothing like waves do
when they get old enough.
“Look at those waves!” Poetry said, meaning the new waves my big rock
had started. There was a widening circle going out from where it had
been struck.
“Reminds me of the waves of Pass Lake, where we spent our vacation last
summer,” Poetry said. “Remember the ones we had the tilt-a-whirl ride
on, when Eagle Eye’s boat upset, and we got separated from it, and if
we hadn’t had our life vests on we’d have been drowned ’cause it was
too far from the shore to swim!”
“Sure,” Dragonfly piped up and said, “and that’s the reason why every
boy in the world who is in a boat or a canoe on a lake or a river
ought to wear a life vest, or else there ought to be plenty of life
preservers in the boat or the canoe, just in case.”
“Hey!” Little Jim piped up and squeaked in his mouse-like voice. “Your
On-onda-something or other has come to life away down the creek!” And
sure enough, it had, for away down the creek, maybe fifty feet further,
there was another V moving along toward the Sugar Creek bridge, which
meant I hadn’t killed the _musquash_ at all, but only scared it, and
maybe my rock hadn’t even hit it at all, and it had ducked and swum
under water like _Ondatra zibethicas_ do in Sugar Creek and like loons
do in Pass Lake in northern Minnesota.
“I’m thirsty,” Circus said, and jumped up from where he had been lying
on his back with his feet propped up on a big hollow stump. That hollow
stump was the same one, I thought, where his pop had slipped down
inside once and had gotten bit by a black widow spider which had had
her web inside.
Right away we were all of us scurrying down the steep hill to the
spring and getting a drink apiece of water, either stooping down and
drinking like cows or else using the paper cups which we had in a
little container on the leaning tree that leaned over the spring and
which we’d put there, instead of the old tin cup which we’d battered
into a flat piece of tin and thrown into Sugar Creek.
All of a sudden, we heard a strange noise up at the top of the hill,
and it sounded like somebody moving along through last year’s dead
leaves and at the same time talking or mumbling to himself about
something.
“Sh!” Dragonfly said, shushing us, he being the one who nearly always
heard or saw something before any of the rest of us did.
We all hushed, and sure enough I heard it. It was a man’s voice, and he
was talking to himself or something up there at the top of the hill.
“Sh!” I said to different ones of us, and we all stopped whatever we
had been doing or saying, and didn’t move, all except Little Jim who
lost his balance, and to keep from falling the wrong direction which
was in a puddle of cold clean water on the other side of the spring,
he had to step awkwardly in several places, jumping from one rock to
another and using his pretty stick-candy-looking stick to help him.
We kept hushed for a jiffy and the sound up at the top of the hill
kept right on--leaves rasping and rustling, and a man’s voice mumbling
something like he was talking to himself.
All of us had our eyes on Big Jim, our leader. I was looking at his
fuzzy mustache, which was like the down on a baby pigeon, and was
wondering who was up at the top of the hill, and thinking about how
I wished I could get a little fuzz on my upper lip, and wondering if
I could make mine grow if I used some kind of cold cream on it, or
something like girls do when they want to look more like older girls
than they are.
Big Jim looked around at the irregular circle of us and nodded to
me and motioned with his thumb for me to follow him up the hill. He
stopped all the rest of the gang from following. In a jiffy, I was
creeping quietly up that steep incline behind Big Jim, and also Little
Jim came along, ’cause right at the last second Big Jim motioned to him
that he could, on account of he had a hurt look in his eyes like maybe
nobody thought he was important ’cause he was so little.
I had a trembling feeling all inside of me ’cause I just knew there was
going to be a surprise at the top of that hill, and maybe a mystery.
Also, I felt proud that Big Jim had picked me out to go up with him,
on account of he nearly always picks Circus who is next biggest in the
gang. I didn’t need to feel proud though, ’cause when I heard a little
slithering noise behind me while I was on the way up, I knew why Circus
didn’t get invited, and it was ’cause he was already half way up a
small sapling which grew near the spring. He was already almost high
enough to see what was going on at the top of the hill, Circus doing
like he is always doing anyway, which is climbing trees most any time
or all the time, he looking like a monkey even when he isn’t up a tree.
The only thing that kept him from hanging by his tail like a monkey was
that he didn’t have any tail, but he could hang by his legs anyway.
When we had almost reached the top, I felt Little Jim’s small hand take
hold of my arm tight, like he was scared, ’cause we could still hear
somebody walking around and talking to himself.
Big Jim stopped us, and we all very slowly half-crawled the rest of
the way up. My heart was pounding like everything, ’cause I just knew
there was going to be excitement at the top, and when you know there is
going to be excitement, you can’t wait for it, but get excited right
away.
“Listen!” Little Jim whispered to me beside me. “He’s pounding
something.”
“Sh!” Big Jim said to us, frowning fiercely, and we kept still. What
on earth was going on up there? I wondered, and wished I was a little
farther up, but Big Jim had stopped us again, so we could listen.
One, two, three--pound, pound, pound... There were about nine or ten
socks with something on something and then the pounding stopped and we
heard footsteps going away.
I looked back down the hill at the rest of the gang. Dragonfly’s
eyes were large and round, like they are when he is half scared or
excited; Poetry had a scowl on his fat face, he being one who has a
detective-like mind and was maybe disappointed that Big Jim had made
him stay at the bottom of the hill; little red-haired Tom Till’s very
freckled face looked very queer. He was stooped over trying to pry a
root loose out of the ground, so he’d be ready to throw it at somebody
or something, if he got a chance or if he had to, and his face looked
like he was ready for some kind of fight, and like he half hoped there
might be one. And if I had been down there at the bottom of the incline
at the spring, and somebody else had been looking down at me, he would
have seen another red-haired freckle-faced boy whose hair was trying to
stand up on end under his old straw hat, and who wasn’t much to look
at, but who had a fiery temper which had to be watched all the time or
it would explode on somebody or something.
Maybe in case you’ve never read anything about the Sugar Creek Gang
before, I’d better tell you that I _am_ red-haired and freckle-faced
and do have a fiery temper some of the time, and that my name is Bill
Collins. I have a swell mom and pop and a baby sister whose name is
Little Charlotte Ann, and I’m the only boy in the Collins family. Not
having any older sisters, I have to wash or wipe the dishes two or
three times a day and help with some of the other girls’ chores around
our house, which maybe is good for me, Pop says, on account of when I
wash dishes the hot sudsy water helps to keep my hands and fingernails
clean.
I whirled around quick from looking down the hill at the rest of the
gang and from seeing Circus who was up the elm sapling trying to see
over the crest of the hill, but probably couldn’t. Big Jim had his
finger up to his pursed lips for all of us to keep on keeping still,
which we did.
The pounding had stopped and we could hear footsteps moving along in
the woods, getting fainter and fainter, and just that second Big Jim
said to us, “He can’t hear us now. His shoes are making so much noise
in the leaves.”
We all got to the top in a jiffy, and looked, and Little Jim whispered
“It’s somebody wearing old overalls,” which it was, and he was
disappearing around the corner of the path that led from the spring
down the creek going toward the old sycamore tree and the swamp.
A few jiffies later, Big Jim gave us the signal and all of us broke
out of our very painful silence and were acting like ourselves again,
but wondering who on earth had been there and what he had been doing,
and why, when all of a sudden, Dragonfly who had been looking around
with Poetry, looking for shoe tracks, let out a yell and said, “Hey,
Gang, come here! Here’s a letter, nailed onto the old Black Widow
Stump!” which is the name we’d given the stump after Circus’ Pop had
been bitten there.
We all made a rush to where Dragonfly’s dragonfly-like eyes were
studying something on the stump, and in a jiffy I was reading the
envelope, and it said on it, in a very awkward old handwriting,
URGENT
To the Sugar Creek Gang
(Personal. Please open at once.)
2
Well sir, I just stood there with all the rest of the members of the
Sugar Creek Gang, staring and staring at the envelope and the crazy old
handwriting on it that said, “Personal. Please Open at once.”
Big Jim, who, as you already know, is the leader of our gang, reached
out and tore the envelope off the nail which had been driven through
the envelope’s upper right-hand corner where the stamp would have been
if there had been one, and handed it to me. “Read it out loud to all of
us,” he said to me.
I couldn’t imagine what was on the inside. I didn’t recognize the
handwriting, and couldn’t even guess who had written it.
“Stand back, everybody,” Big Jim ordered. “And let him have plenty of
room.”
“Yeah, let him have plenty of room. It might explode,” Dragonfly said.
I tore open the envelope in a hurry, and this is what I read:
“Members of the Sugar Creek Gang--Big Jim, Little Jim, Poetry,
Circus, Dragonfly, Bill Collins, and Tom Till--as soon as you
can, after reading this, make a beeline for Bumblebee Hill,
climb through the barbed-wire fence at the top and stop at the
tombstone of Sarah Paddler in the old abandoned cemetery. There
you will find another letter giving you instructions what to do
next. It is VERY IMPORTANT.
Signed ... (Guess Who)”
I read the letter out loud in a sort of trembling voice on account of I
was a little bit scared, then I looked around at the different ones of
us to see what we were thinking, but couldn’t tell.
“What’ll we do?” Little Jim piped up and said, and Little Tom Till
swallowed real hard like he had taken too big a bite of something and
was trying to swallow it without having chewed it long enough, then he
sort of stuttered, “M-maybe a g-ghost wrote it.”
I looked quick at Dragonfly on account of he believes there is such a
thing as a ghost on account his mother thinks there is such a thing,
and right away he had a funny expression on his face. Dragonfly’s
dragonfly-like eyes looked like they were even larger than they were.
“My mother told me to stay out of that cemetery.”
“Aw, fraidy cat,” Poetry said, “there isn’t any such thing as a ghost.
Besides, ghosts can’t write.”
“Oh yes, they can!” Dragonfly said. “I saw it in the newspaper once
that a senator or something’s speech was written by a ghost writer
and--”
“It’s _crazy!_” Poetry said. “A ghost writer is somebody nobody knows
who writes something for somebody and nobody knows it, but it’s a real
person and not a ghost, which isn’t.”
It sounded crazy, but Poetry read an awful lot of the many books his
pop and mom were always buying for him, and he was as smart as anything.
Little Tom spoke up then and said, “A ghost wouldn’t know that
Bumblebee Hill had had its name changed from Strawberry Hill to
Bumblebee Hill, would it?” And right away I was remembering that hill,
where the gang had had a fierce fight with a town gang when Little Tom
had still belonged to that other gang, and we had all of us stirred
up a bumblebee’s nest on that hillside and gotten stung in different
places, which had hurt worse than each other’s fists had, and the fight
had broken up, and we’d given that hill a new name. In that fight as
you maybe know, two red-haired boys had had a terrible battle and one
of the red-haired freckled-faced boys had licked the other one all to
smithereens for awhile, until I had started fighting a little harder
and then I’d licked him even worse, all in the same fight.
Big Jim spoke up then and said, “A ghost probably couldn’t spell
our names. Anyway, let’s get going to the old cemetery and see what
happens.”
With that, Circus was already on his way, running like a deer, with all
of us right at his heels as fast as we could go. Talking about spelling
must have reminded Poetry of a poem, for, as you know, he was always
learning new poems by heart and quoting them to us, he knowing maybe a
hundred of them, and you never knew when he was going to start one of
them at the wrong time. He hardly ever got to finish one, though, on
account of the gang’s stopping him, or else it was too long to finish
it before we all thought of something we all’d rather do than listen to
his poem.
Anyway, while he and I were puffing along with the rest of the gang
toward Bumblebee Hill, he started in puffing out a new one I’d never
heard before, and this is the way it went:
“The teacher has no E Z time
To teach his A, B, C’s:
It per C V rance takes sublime,
And all his N R G’s.
In K C doesn’t use the birch
All kindness does S A,
The scholars who X L at church,
In school will ½ to pay ...”
“Don’t use the word _birch_,” I panted to Poetry, and he panted back at
me, “Why?”
“’Cause it reminds me of _beech_, and _beech_ reminds me of a beech
switch which reminds me of a schoolteacher and that reminds me of
school, and----”
Poetry cut in on my sentence and said, “_Birch_ reminds me of a birch
tree away up North where we were on our camping trip once, and where
I’d like to go again this year. In fact, it’s getting so hot that I
don’t see how we can stand not going up there again.”
I looked out of the corner of my right eye at him as we dashed along
behind and beside and in front of the gang toward Bumblebee Hill, and
said, “I don’t see why we have to stay where it is so hot ALL summer.”
That started him off on his poem again and he get another whole verse
in before we reached the bottom of Bumblebee Hill, and had to have
most of our wind for climbing and not much for talking. This is the
next verse which he puffed out to me, the poem still talking about a
schoolteacher and was:
“They can’t C Y he makes them learn
L S N and his rules,
They C K chance to overturn,
Preferring 2B fools.”
I found out later how to spell out the poem when he showed it to me in
his mother’s old scrapbook. It was a clever poem, I thought.
Puff, puff, puff, up the hill we went, and at the cemetery stopped. It
was a real spooky place, all overgrown with weeds, and choke-berry,
and blue vervain, and mullein stalks, the blue vervain being one of the
very prettiest wild flowers in all Sugar Creek territory, but which all
the farmers called a weed, and which maybe it was. But up real close
and under a magnifying glass its flowers are very pretty. Just as I
was climbing through the fence beside Little Jim, holding two strands
of barbed wire far enough apart for him to slither through and not get
his nice pretty new blue shirt caught, Little Jim, who is a sort of a
dreamer and is always imagining what something or other looks like,
said to me, “They look like upside down candelabrums, don’t they?”
Little Jim knew I liked flowers myself, on account of my mom liked them
so well, and always wanted me to pick some and set them in vases in
different parts of our house.
“What looks like what?” Dragonfly said, and sneezed, and I knew right
away that he was allergic to something in the cemetery, he being that
way about nearly everything in Sugar Creek in the summertime, and when
people are allergic to things like that, they nearly always sneeze a
lot.
Little Jim finished getting through without getting his shirt caught
and said, “The flower spikes which branch off from the stem of the
vervain look like upside down candelabrum,” and I remembered that his
mother, besides being the best pianist in all Sugar Creek territory,
and taught piano and was maybe the prettiest mom of all the Sugar
Creek’s Gang’s moms, also had all kinds of flowers in a special flower
garden at their home, and she talked flowers so much that Little Jim
probably knew all the different kinds of words that people use when
they talk flowers.
Little Jim broke off a stalk of vervain, and I noticed that there was
a little purplish ring of small flowers at the very bottom of every
one of the very slender flower spikes, which is the way vervain do
their flowering. They begin with a little purple ring of flowers at
the bottom of the spike about the first of July, and the flowers keep
on blooming all summer, the ring creeping up higher and higher until
school starts about the first of September, and pretty soon the flowers
get clear to the top; then kinda like blue rings slipping off the ends
of green fingers, they are all gone.
Well, in a jiffy, there we all were, standing around in a sort of half
circle, looking over each other’s shoulders and between each other’s
heads, right in front of Old Man Paddler’s dead wife’s tall tombstone.
Her name had been Sarah Paddler, and she had died a long time ago.
There were a couple of other tombstones there too, for the old man’s
two boys who had died about the same time many years ago, and that old
kind old man, whom the Sugar Creek Gang loved so well, had maybe been
using all the love which he had had left over, when his own boys died,
and, instead of wasting it on a dog or a lot of other things, he was
pouring it out on us live boys instead.
Carved or chiselled on the tombstone was the figure of a hand with the
forefinger pointing up toward the sky, and right below the hand were
the words:
“There is Rest in Heaven.”
Standing on a little ledge, and fastened onto the tombstone with what
is called scotch tape, was another envelope like the one we had just
found and had read down at the Black Widow Stump, and on it it said,
URGENT
To the Sugar Creek Gang
(Personal. Open at once.)
Well, this time Big Jim took the envelope, and handed it to Little Jim
who read it in his squeaky voice to all of us, and this is what it said
in rhyme:
“The Sugar Creek Gang is on the right track
Now turn right around and hurry right back--
Go straight to the old hollow sycamore tree,
And there if you look, you will see what you see.”
This time it didn’t say it was signed by “Guess Who,” but the poetry
sounded like Poetry’s poetry, and I looked at him and he was busy
studying the ground around there to see if he could find any shoe
tracks.
“Last one to the sycamore tree is a cow’s tail,” Circus said, and
started to make a dive for the cemetery fence just as Dragonfly got a
queer look on his face, like he was going to sneeze but wasn’t quite
sure whether he was or not. Dragonfly looked toward the sun, which hurt
his eyes a little, and that maybe made tears, which, with his face
raised like that, tickled his nose on the _inside_ and he let out one
of his favorite sneezes, which was half blocked like a football kick,
but went off to one side. Then he sneezed again three times, just as
fast as if he couldn’t help it, and said, “I’m allergic to something in
this old graveyard. I’m allergic to ghosts.”
Right away we were all dashing toward the barbed-wire fence, and all
of us got through without tearing our clothes and went zippety-zip-zip
dash, swerve, swish-swish-swish, toward the spring again, and down the
path that led along the top of the hill toward Sugar Creek Bridge, and
then across the old north road, and up a steep bank and down the path
again toward the old sycamore tree and the swamp, and also toward the
entrance to the cave which is a long cave, as you know, and the other
end comes out in the basement of Old Man Paddler’s log cabin back up in
the hills.
“I’m thirsty,” Poetry puffed beside me.
“So am I,” I said, and right that second I remembered that when I’d
gone to the spring in the first place, more than maybe an hour ago,
I’d taken a water pail from our milk house and was supposed to bring
back a pail of sparkling cool water, when I came home. “There isn’t any
hurry,” Pop had told me, “but when you do come back be _sure_ to bring
a pail of water.”
“I will,” I had said to him, and now as we whizzed past the spring, I
remembered that the water pail was on a flat stone down at the bottom
of the hill at the spring.
“Who do you suppose is writing all these notes?” I said to Poetry,
forgetting the water again.
“Yeah, who do you suppose?” Poetry said to me from behind me, he being
so fat he couldn’t keep up. “I know something I won’t tell,” he said to
me, and when I said, “What?” he said, “Two little ‘niggers’ in a peanut
shell.”
“Don’t call ’em niggers!” a voice behind us said, and it was Little
Jim’s voice.
“Why not?” Dragonfly wanted to know.
Say, Little Jim’s voice which most of the time was very mild and kind,
spoke up like it was angry and said, “’Cause negroes are real people,
and ’cause--”
Right that second Little Jim’s words got mixed up with a grunt which
came out of his throat at the same time, and sounded so queer I turned
around to see what happened, ’cause I knew something had, and my eyes
lit on him just in time to see him turn a lopsided flipflop on the
ground. He had stumbled over a root with his bare right big toe, or
else caught his bare right big toe in his overall leg and stumbled and
fell sprawling.
I stopped quick, got bumped into by Poetry, who was behind me, but
didn’t fall down myself, whirled around and went back to help Little
Jim get up.
Circus and Big Jim were far ahead of us. “Did you get hurt?” Little
Tom Till asked, and Little Jim sat up rubbing his elbow and grinning
and said, “You shouldn’t call em niggers, ’cause they’re human beings
and God made ’em. My mother and dad have adopted a little black boy in
Africa for a whole year. You can adopt one for only $52.00 a year.”
Say, that little guy had the most innocent lamb-like look on his face
you ever saw. He was always saying things like that, and not a one
of us thought he was too religious or anything. In fact, everyone of
us had already become Christians ourselves, only most of us weren’t
quite as brave as Little Jim was, just talking right out about what we
thought, without caring what anybody said, most of us thinking a lot
more than we said. Poetry especially was bashful, especially in his
Sunday school class, on account of his voice was changing and was more
like a duck’s with a bad cold, than a boy’s, and was half man’s and
half boy’s voice anyway.
“Come on! you guys!” Dragonfly yelled back to us from up ahead, and we
all swished on.
It was quite a long run to the sycamore tree, but we got there quick,
and found Circus and Big Jim looking inside the big long opening in its
side for the letter or whatever it was we were supposed to find. In a
jiffy Circus had it out and was waving it around in the air for us to
see, and when we gathered around, we saw that it was an envelope with
our names on it, only it was an actual honest-to-goodness letter with
a postmark on it which, when I got close enough to see, I saw was Pass
Lake, Minnesota.
Say, something in my heart went flippety-flop, and I just knew who the
letter was from. For some reason I knew, _knew_ what was going to be
inside. It was going to be a letter from the same great big fat man on
whose property on Pass Lake we’d had our camp last summer, and he was
inviting us to come up again for a week or two or maybe more.
Say, it certainly didn’t take us long to find out that I was right,
which I knew I was.
“It’s from Santa Claus!” Dragonfly said, Santa Claus being the name
we’d given to the man whom we’d all liked so well on our camping trip
and whose wife had made such good blackberry pies.
Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah! We all read the letter, and felt so wonderful
inside we wanted to yell and scream.
There was one paragraph in the letter that bothered us, though, and it
was, “Be sure, of course, to get your parents’ consent, all of you, and
be sure to bring along your fishing tackle. Fishing is good. Little
Snow-in-the-face will be eager to see you all. He has been very sick
this past week, and has been taken to the government hospital. Be sure
to pray for him. His big brother, Eagle Eye, has a real Sunday school
going here, but his mother and father are not yet believers on the Lord
Jesus Christ, and that makes it hard for him. But Snow-in-the-face is a
very brave little Christian.”
Right that second, we heard footsteps coming in our direction, and
looking up I saw a dark brown smiling face, a row of shining white
teeth with one all-gold tooth right in front, and I knew it was Barry
Boyland, Old Man Paddler’s nephew, who had taken us to Pass Lake last
year.
“Hi, gang!” he called to us, and we called back to him, “Hello, Barry.”
And we all swarmed around him to tell him about the letter and to ask
questions, all of us knowing that he was the one who had written the
notes for us, just to make the last letter more mysterious and more of
a surprise.
Well, it was time to go home, and try to convince our parents that we
all needed a vacation very badly. For some reason I wasn’t sure my
folks would say I could go.
3
“How’ll we do it?” I asked Poetry, as he and Dragonfly and I stopped at
our gate to let Poetry and Dragonfly go on home, and to let me go on in.
“How’ll we do _what_?” Dragonfly wanted to know, and right away sneezed
at something or other, probably at some of the flowers in Mom’s little
flower bed around our mail box.
Dragonfly reached for and pulled out of his hip pocket his pop’s big
red bandana handkerchief and grabbed his nose just in time to stop most
of the next three sneezes, which came in one-two-three style as fast as
a boy pounding a nail with a hammer.
“How’ll we convince our parents that we need a vacation?” Poetry said,
and Dragonfly piped up and said, “People take vacations when they’re
worn out from too much work.”
“Overworking?” I said, and Dragonfly sneezed again, and looked down
at Mom’s very pretty happy-looking different-colored gladiolus in the
half-moon flower bed around the mail box.
“If you don’t quit planting gladioluses around here, I can’t come over
and play here anymore.”
“Or work, either,” Poetry said, and I said, “Well, you guys better beat
it, I’ve got to overwork a little.” I opened our gate, squeezed through
it and started on the run for our tool shed where I found a nice clean
hoe which I’d cleaned myself the last time I’d used it, and in a few
jiffies I was out in our garden hoeing potatoes as hard as I could,
getting hotter and hotter and sweating like everything. Sweat was
running off my face and I could feel it on my back, too. With a little
wind blowing across from the woods and Sugar Creek I felt fine even in
the hot sun. I certainly wasn’t getting tired as fast as I thought I
would on account of when a boy sweats at hard work and the wind blows a
little, he feels better than when he just kinda lazies around and tries
to keep cool.
I wished Pop, who had gone somewhere for something, would hurry home
and see me working hard. It was almost fun hoeing the potatoes, though
it was kinda hard not to stop at the end of each row and pick and eat a
few luscious blackberries which grew there. In fact, I did stop a few
times, which is maybe why I got to the end of each row quicker.
Once I got thirsty, and went into the house for a drink of water, and
Mom called out to the kitchen from the front room and said, “That you,
Theodore?” which is Pop’s first name.
“Nope, it’s just me,” I said to Mom.
“Come on in a minute, Bill. Somebody wants to see you.”
“Who?” I said, wondering who it was and hoping it wasn’t anybody I
didn’t know.
I peeked around the corner of the kitchen door and saw our lady Sunday
school teacher. All of a sudden I felt good, although kinda bashful, on
account of I was in my overalls and was probably very dusty and sweaty
and maybe had my hair mussed up.
We said a few bashful words to each other, and she said, “I brought you
that book of Indian stories,” and right away I was thinking of little
“Snow-in-the-face” up North and wishing I could go up and see him again.
I thanked her for the book, and said, “Well--thanks, that’s swell--I
mean, Thank you so very much,” which was what I thought Mom would want
me to say in the way I said it.
“Don’t overwork,” she said to me with a smile in her voice, and I said
“I will,” and was going out the kitchen door before I knew I’d said the
wrong thing. She certainly was a good Sunday school teacher, and knew
how to make a boy like her, and also want to come back to Sunday school
every Sunday.
Just as I was about to let the door shut behind me quietly like I
do when we have company, I heard the news on the radio in the front
room, and I knew that maybe Mom and my teacher had been listening to
the radio when I came in, and had turned it low for a jiffy. One of
the things I heard was about a little St. Paul, Minnesota girl named
Marie Ostberg having been kidnapped and a reward being offered by the
father... Then I heard the announcer mention something that I thought
was a wonderful idea and it was: “Duluth--the hayfever colony--will
have thousands of new visitors this year, because the heavy rains
throughout the nation have made it the worst for pollen in many years.
Thousands will be going north...”
That would give us _two_ reasons why some of the gang ought to get to
go--overwork and hayfever. Dragonfly had the hayfever, and if I worked
awful hard, I might overwork, although it’d be easier to have hayfever
if I could only get it.
Right that second, while I was picking up the hoe to go back to the
potatoes again, I heard our car horn and Pop was at the gate, waiting
for me to come and open it. Boy, was I ever glad I was hot and sweaty
and that there were four or five long rows of potatoes already hoed
which Pop could see himself.
“Hi,” I said to my reddish-brownish-mustached Pop. And he just lifted
one of his big farmer hands and saluted me like I was an officer in
the army and he only a private. I swung open the gate, and, seeing the
gladiolus by the mail box, stopped and took three or four quick deep
sniffs at them, just as Pop swung inside and stopped beside the big
plum tree in the gravelled driveway.
Then I looked quick at the sun, to see if I could sneeze, and I
actually did, three times in quick succession, just as Pop turned off
the motor and heard me do it.
“I hope you aren’t going to catch cold,” Pop said, and looked at me
suspiciously. “You boys go in swimming today?”
“The water was almost too hot,” I said. “I never felt better in my
life, only----” Right that second, something in my nose tickled again
and I sneezed and was glad of it. “Maybe I’m allergic to something down
here....”
“Down _where_?” Pop said, and looked at me from under his heavy
eyebrows, which I noticed weren’t up any more but were starting to
drop a little in the middle, like he was wondering “What on earth?”
and trying to figure me out, like I was a problem in arithmetic or
something.
“I mean----” I started to answer him, and then decided maybe it was the
wrong time to talk to Pop about what I wanted to talk to him about. So
I said, “Well, I better get back to those potatoes. There are only two
more rows.”
“_Back_ to them?” Pop said, astonished. “You mean----?” He slid out of
our long green car and looked toward the garden, and even from where we
were, you could see that somebody had been hoeing the potatoes. “Well,
what do you know about _that_? That’s wonderful! That’s unusual! That’s
astonishing,” which I knew was some of Pop’s friendly sarcasm which he
was always using on me, and I sort of liked it on account of Pop and
I were good friends as well as he being my pop and I his red-haired,
freckled-faced overworked boy, who didn’t have hayfever yet but was
trying to get it.
Right that second I sneezed again, and Pop looked at me and said,
“What’s that grin on your face for?” and I said, “Is there a grin on my
face?”
“There certainly is,” he said, and I sighed and wished I could sneeze
again, which for some reason I did, without even trying to, or looking
at the sun, or smelling the gladiolus or anything, and I got a quick
hope that maybe I was actually going to get hayfever.
Pop banged the car door shut, after taking out a paper bag which had
something in it he’d probably bought somewhere in town. Then he said,
“You’ve maybe been working too hard and been sweating, and with the
wind blowing, you need a dry shirt. Better come in the house and help
your mother and Charlotte Ann and me eat this ice cream,” which I did,
our Sunday school teacher helping also, she being the reason Pop had
hurried to town to get the ice cream in the first place.
Then Mom told me to go gather the eggs, which I started to do, and
ran ker-smack into something very interesting. I was up in our haymow
looking for old Bentcomb’s nest for her daily egg, which was always
there if she laid one, although sometimes she missed a day.
“Well, what do you know?” I said to myself when I climbed up over the
alfalfa to her corner. Old Bentcomb was still on the nest and her
pretty bent comb was hanging down over her left eye. She was sitting
there like she owned the whole haymow and who was I to be intruding?
“Hi, Old Bentcomb!” I said, “How’re you this afternoon? Got your egg
laid yet?”
She didn’t budge, but just squatted down lower with her wings all
spread out covering the whole nest.
“Where’s your egg?” I said, and reached out my hand toward her, and
“zip-zip-peck,” quick as lightning her sharp bill pecked me on the hand
and wrist. She wouldn’t let me get near her without pecking at me, and
when I tried to lift her off to see if she’d laid an egg today, she was
mad as anything, and complained like she was being mistreated, and gave
a saddish disgruntled string of cluck-cluck-clucks at me and at the
whole world.
I let her stay and scooted down the ladder and ran ker-whizz to the
house, stormed into our back door and said to Mom, “Hey, Mom, Old
Bentcomb wants to ‘set’! What’ll we do--break her up or let her set?”
“For land’s sakes,” Mom said to me, “don’t knock the world off its
hinges!--_What! Old Bentcomb!_”
“Actually!” I said, “--up in the haymow!”
“We’ll break her up,” Mom said. “We can’t have her hatching a nest of
chickens up there.”
“Couldn’t we make her a nest down here, out by the grape arbor?
Couldn’t we put her in the new coop Pop and I made?”
“Better break her up,” Mom said, “she’s one of our best laying hens and
if we set her, she’ll be busy all summer raising her family, and not an
egg will we get.”
“But we break her up every year, and she never has a family of her
own,” I said. “I think she’d look awfully proud and pretty strutting
around the barnyard with a whole flock of little white chickens
following her,”--which is one of the prettiest sights a boy ever sees
on a farm--a mother hen with a whole flock of fuzzy-wuzzy little
chickens behind and beside and in front of her, and running quick
whenever she clucks for them to come and they all gather around her and
eat the different things which she finds for them, such as small bugs,
pieces of barnyard food, small grains of this or that and just plain
stuff.
“Well, maybe you’re right,” Mom said, all of a sudden, “let’s set
her. First, let’s get her nest ready and select fifteen of the nicest
leghorn eggs we can find and have them all ready for her; then you go
get her and bring her down.”
“She won’t want to leave her nice warm nest up in the haymow,” I said
to Mom, looking up at her kinda pretty, warmish summer face under its
blue sunbonnet.
“No, she won’t,” Mom said back to me, “But she’ll do it if we work it
right. Hens are very particular about moving from one nest to another.
We’ll maybe have to shut her up in the coop.”
Well, it was one of the most interesting things I liked to do around
the farm. First, we took a nice brand new chicken coop which was
just about as high as halfway between my knees and my belt, then we
scooped a foot-in-diameter roundish hole in the ground close to our
grape arbor, making the hole about only a few inches deep. We lined
it with nice clean straw and then selected fifteen of the prettiest,
cleanest white eggs we could find which had been laid that very day
by the different leghorn other hens on our farm, and which would
probably be what were called “fertile eggs” and would hatch. Then I ran
lickety-sizzle as fast as I could to our barn, scooted up the ladder
into our haymow, and in spite of Old Bentcomb’s being very angry and
not wanting to leave her nest, I got her under one arm and brought her
down the ladder.
In less than a jiffy or two, I was with her up to where Mom and I were
going to coop her up in the coop. I stooped down first and looked into
the dark inside of the coop and there was the prettiest, nicest most
beautiful fifteen eggs you ever saw all side by each. The coop had a
roof on it but no floor, the floor being the ground with the straw nest
in it. I pushed Bentcomb very gently and in a friendly way up to the
hole in the front of the coop, and let her look in at the nest full of
eggs. She had been clucking like everything and whining and complaining
in a saddish sort of voice which meant she wanted to be a mother of a
whole flock of little chickens, but say! She was mad at me and didn’t
want to go in. She kept turning away from the hole in the coop not even
looking at the nice new nest. So I said to her, “O.K., Old Bentcomb,
I’ll take you out and show you what will happen to you if you _don’t_
sit on those eggs.”
I took her in my two hands, holding her tight so she wouldn’t squirm
loose and get away, and walked with her to our chicken house and around
behind it to where there was a peach tree under which we had a pen
with chickenyard wire all around and on top. Inside were about nine
or a dozen of our best laying hens who had wanted to set, but whom
we decided to “break up” instead of letting them have their stubborn
hen-ways and “set.” There they were, all shut up by themselves. Some of
them were walking around with their wings all spread out, and clucking
like they wanted a bunch of little chickens to come and crawl under
them, and they were cluck-cluck-clucking in a saddish whining tone of
voice. Over in one corner was a white egg which meant that one of the
hens had already given up wanting to “set” and was behaving herself
again like a good laying hen. And I thought that as soon as we could
decide which one of the hens it was, we’d take her out and let her have
her liberty again.
“See there,” I said to Bentcomb, “look at those lonesome old hens!
They’re clucking around just like you’ve been doing. Every one of them
wanted a family of her own, and not one of them is going to get it! If
you don’t be good, and go in that coop like we want you to, we’ll have
to shut you up in here and leave you for two whole weeks, which we do
to all hens who want to ‘set’ and we won’t let ’em.”
Say, Bentcomb wasn’t interested at all. She absolutely refused to look,
so I took her back again to the coop. “I’m going to give you one more
chance,” I said. “I want you to go in there carefully, not breaking any
of those eggs, and behave yourself.”
Once more I got down on my knees, holding her carefully like she was a
very good friend, which she was, and so she could look in and see for
herself what we wanted her to do.
Well sir, this time she must have decided to be good, ’cause all of a
sudden, she quit struggling and looked in like she’d made up her mind
it might be a good place for her to live for awhile. Without me doing
any pushing, or anything, she very slowly started to creep inside the
opening in the coop, toward the eggs. The next thing I knew she was on
the nest, turning around and scooting herself down and spreading her
wings out and settling down and covering every one of those fifteen
eggs with her wings.