Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 13-18 Read online

  We knew he was right. And that meant, as plain as the nose on Dragonfly’s face, that if we left this house and went back to where our trail had branched off and followed the broken twigs in that other direction, we’d come to the place where the money was buried.

  Boy oh boy oh boy! I felt so good I wanted to scream. It was just like being in a dream, which you know isn’t a dream—and you’re glad it isn’t. Only in dreams you always wake up, which maybe I’d do in just another excited minute.

  “Is this a dream or not?” I asked my roly-poly goat.

  And he said, “I don’t know, but I know how I can find out for you,” and I said, “How?” and he said, “I’ll pinch you to see if there is any pain, and if there is, it isn’t, and if there isn’t, it is.” He was trying to be funny and not being, because right that second he pinched me, and it hurt as it always does when he pinches me, only worse.

  “Ouch!” I said, and right away I pinched him, so he could find out for himself that the map wasn’t any dream and neither was my hard pinch on his arm.

  The rain was still pounding on the roof, sounding like a fast train roaring past the depot at Sugar Creek. We all sat looking at each other with weird expressions on our faces and mixed-up thoughts in our minds. And then the candle burned out.

  I was still smelling the dead something-or-other. The odor seemed to come from the kitchen, which was on the side of the cottage next to the steep hillside. Right above its one window I noticed there was a stubby pine tree growing out of the hill, its branches extending over the roof.

  Because the rain wasn’t blowing against the window, I opened it and looked out. Water was streaming down the hill like a little river, pouring onto the cement walk and rippling around the outside of the cabin. I thought how smart the owners of the cabin had been to put that cement walk there, so the water that gushed down the hillside could run away and not pour into the house.

  It was while I was at the window that I noticed an old rusty wire stretched across from the stubby pine tree toward the cabin. I yelled to the rest of the gang to come and look, which they did.

  “It’s a telephone wire,” Dragonfly said.

  Poetry, squeezing in between Dragonfly and me and looking up at the wire, said, “I’ll bet it’s a radio aerial!” His voice got excited right away, and he turned back into the kitchen. “There might be a radio around here somewhere!” With that he started looking for one.

  We helped him, going from the kitchen to the darkish main room, where the fireplace was, and through the door curtains into the bedroom, which had the roll-away bed in it, all folded up against the wall. Then we hunted through the screened porch and looked under some old canvas on the porch floor, but there wasn’t any radio anywhere.

  “There’s got to be one,” Circus said. “That’s an aerial, I’m sure.”

  Poetry spoke up and said, “If it is, let’s look for the place where it comes into the cabin.”

  We did, and we found it. It was through the top of a window in the bedroom. But that didn’t clear up our problem even a tiny bit, because there was only a piece of twisted wire hanging down from the curtain pole, and it wasn’t fastened to anything.

  Well, that was that. Besides, what’d we want to know whether there was a radio for? “Who cares?” I said, feeling I was the leader and wishing Poetry wouldn’t insist on following out all his ideas.

  “Goof!” he said to me, which was what he was always calling me, but I shushed him and said, “Keep, still, Goat! Who’s the head of this treasure hunt?”

  He puckered his forehead at me and half yelled above the roar of the rain on the roof, “If there’s a radio, it means somebody’s been living here just lately.”

  “And if there isn’t, then what?”

  It was Dragonfly who saw the edge of a newspaper sticking out from between the folded-up roll-away bed in the corner. He quick pulled it out and opened it.

  We looked at the date, and it was just a week old! In fact, it was dated the day before we’d caught the kidnapper, so we were pretty sure he’d been here at that same time.

  Well, the rain on the roof was getting less noisy, and we knew that pretty soon we’d have to be starting back to camp. We wouldn’t dare try to follow the trail of broken branches to the place where we thought the money was buried, because we had orders to be back at camp an hour before supper time to help with the camp chores. That night we were going to have a very special campfire service with Eagle Eye, an honest-to-goodness Chippewa Indian, telling us a bloodcurdling story of some kind—a real live Indian story.

  “Let’s get going,” I said to the rest of us, “just the minute it stops raining.”

  “Do we go out the door or the window?” my man Friday asked.

  I took a look at the only door and saw that it was nailed shut, tighter than anything.

  I grunted and groaned and pulled at the knob, then gave up and said, “Looks like we’ll use the window.”

  It was still raining pretty hard, and I had the feeling I wanted to go out and take a last look at the lake. I’d been thinking also that if this cabin was fixed up a little and the underbrush between it and the lake and the battered old dock was cleared away, and if the walls were painted a light color, it might make a nice cabin for somebody to rent and spend a summer vacation in, the way a lot of people in America do.

  On the wall of the porch I noticed a small mirror. It was dusty and needed to be wiped off before I could see myself. I stopped just a second to see what I looked like, as I sometimes do at home, especially just before I make a dash to our dinner table. Sometimes I get stopped before I can sit down. Then I have to go back and finish washing my face and combing my hair before I get to take even one bite of Mom’s great fried chicken.

  I certainly didn’t look much like the pictures I’d seen of Robinson Crusoe. Instead of looking like a shipwrecked person with homemade clothes, I looked just like an ordinary wreck without any ship. My red hair was mussed up, my freckled face was dirty, and my two large front teeth still looked too big for my face, which would have to grow a lot more before it was big enough to fit my teeth. I was glad my teeth were already as big as they would ever get—which is why lots of boys and girls look funny when they’re just my size, Mom says. Our teeth grow in as large as they’ll ever be, and our faces just sort of take their time.

  “You’re an ugly mutt,” I said to myself and then turned and looked out over the lake again. Anyway, I was growing a little bit, and I had awfully good health and felt wonderful most of the time.

  While I was looking out at the pretty lake, some of the same feeling I’d had before came bubbling up inside of me. For a minute I wished Little Jim had been with us. In fact, I wished he were standing right beside me with the stick in his hand that he almost always carries wherever he goes.

  I was feeling good inside because the gang was still letting me be Robinson Crusoe and was taking most of my orders. Sometime, I said to myself, I’d like to be a leader of a whole lot of people, who would do whatever I wanted them to. I might be a general in an army, or maybe a governor. But I wanted to be a doctor, too, and help people to get well. Also I wanted to help save people from their troubles and from being too poor, like Circus’s folks. And I wished I could take all the whiskey there was in the world and dump it into a lake, except that I wouldn’t want the perch and northern pike or walleyes or the pretty bluegills or bass or sunfish to have to drink any of it. Maybe I wouldn’t care if some of the bullheads did.

  While I was standing there, thinking about that pretty lake and knowing that Little Jim, the best Christian in the gang, would say something about the Bible if he was there, I remembered part of a Bible story that happened out on a stormy, rolling lake just like this one. Then I remembered that in the story of Robinson Crusoe there had been a Bible and that he had taught his man Friday a lot of things out of it and Friday had became a Christian himself.

  My dad used to read Robinson Crusoe to Mom and me many a night in the winter
. Dad read good stories to us instead of letting me listen to whatever there was on the radio that wouldn’t be good for a boy to hear, and my folks having to make me turn it off. Dad always picked a story to read that was interesting to a red-haired boy and would be what Mom called “good mental furniture”—whatever that was or is.

  All of the gang nearly always carried New Testaments in our pockets. So, remembering that Robinson Crusoe had had a Bible, I took out my New Testament and stood with my back to the rest of the cabin, still looking at the lake. I felt terribly good inside with that little brown leather Testament in my hands. I was glad that the One who is the main character in it was a Friend of mine and that He liked boys.

  “It was great of You to help us find the little Ostberg girl,” I said to Him, “and also to catch the kidnapper. And it’s an awful pretty lake and sky and—”

  Right then I was interrupted by music coming from back in the cabin somewhere. I heard some people’s voices singing a song I knew and that we sometimes sang in church back at Sugar Creek. It was:

  Rescue the perishing, care for the dying,

  Jesus is merciful, Jesus will save.

  I guessed quick that one of my goats or else my man Friday had actually found a radio in the cabin and had turned it on. I dashed back inside and through the curtains into the bedroom where I’d left them, where what to my wondering eyes should appear but the roll-away bed opened out. There, sitting on the side of it, were my two goats and my man Friday with a little portable radio. It was on my roly-poly goat’s lap and was playing like a house afire that very pretty church hymn:

  Down in the human heart, crushed by the

  tempter,

  Feelings lie buried that grace can restore.

  As I got there, the music stopped, and a voice broke in and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt this program to make a very important announcement. There is a new angle regarding the ransom money still missing in the Ostberg kidnapping case. Little Marie’s father, a religious man, has just announced that the amount represented a sum he had been saving for the past several years to build a memorial hospital in the heart of Palm Tree Island. In St. Paul, the suspect, caught last week near Bemidji by a group of boys on vacation, still denies knowing anything about the ransom money. He claims he never received it. Police are now working on the supposition that there may have been another party to the crime. Residents of northern Minnesota are warned to be on the lookout for a man bearing the following description: He is believed to be of German descent, about thirty-seven years of age, six feet two inches tall, weighs one hundred eighty pounds, is stoop-shouldered, has a dark complexion and red hair, is partly bald, has bulgy steel-blue eyes, bushy eyebrows …”

  The description went on, but I didn’t need any more. My heart was already bursting with the most awful feeling I’d had in a long time, because the person they were describing was exactly like old hook-nosed John Till!

  John Till was the mean, liquor-drinking father of one of the Sugar Greek Gang, little red-haired Tom Till himself—one of my very best friends, whom all of us liked and felt terribly sorry for.

  We knew that Tom had the kind of father who had been in jail lots of times and who spent his money on whiskey and gambling. We knew that his mother had to be sad most of the time. In fact, about the only happiness his mom had was in her boy Tom, who was a really great little guy and went to Sunday school with us. She also got a little happiness out of a radio that my folks had bought for her, and she listened to Christian programs, which cheered her up a lot.

  Even while I listened to the radio that was on my roly-poly goat’s lap, I was thinking about Little Tom’s mom and wondering if she had her radio turned on back at Sugar Creek and would hear this announcement, and if it would be like somebody jabbing a knife into her heart and twisting it.

  But we didn’t have time to think or talk or anything else. Suddenly I heard a noise coming from the direction of the kitchen window that we had climbed in. I took a quick peek through the door curtains, and I saw the face of a fierce-looking man. It took me only one second’s glance to see the bushy eyebrows that met in the center just above the top of his hooked nose. And even though he had on a battered felt hat that was dripping wet and his clothes were sopping, I recognized him as Little Tom’s father.

  I remembered the first time I had seen John Till. He’d been hired by my dad to shock oats, and he had tried to get Circus’s dad to take a drink of whiskey. It had been a terribly hot day, and Circus and I had been helping shock oats too. Circus’s pop hadn’t been a Christian very long, and because I didn’t want him to do what is called “backslide,” I had made a terribly fast run across the field to try to stop him from taking the drink. I’d run ker-wham, with both fists flying, straight into John Till’s stomach. A little later I’d landed on my back under the elderberry bushes after a fierce wham from one of John Till’s hard fists.

  After that, the gang had had a lot of other trouble with John Till, but we’d seen Little Tom saved, and Tom had been praying for his dad every day since. Up to now it looked like praying hadn’t done any good. His father still was a bad man and caused his family a lot heartache.

  Talk about mystery and excitement! I knew Tom’s dad hated us boys. Also he was pretty mean to Tom for going to church with us, and on top of that he was mad at my folks for taking Tom’s mom to church. Whenever he came into the house and she had a Christian program on the radio, he would either make her turn it off or he would turn it off himself.

  I’ll have to admit that I was afraid of old hook-nosed John Till. And right then I didn’t feel much like being the leader of the gang, which for some reason all of a sudden seemed to be made up of only four very small boys. The only thing I felt like leading was a very fast footrace out through the woods and toward camp.

  “Quick!” I whispered. “There’s somebody looking through the kitchen window. What’ll we do?” Before anybody could answer, I saw the man’s hand shove up the window. One of his wet long legs, which had a big wet shoe on the end of it, swung over the window ledge, and he started squirming his long-legged self in after it.

  6

  Well, what can you do when there isn’t a thing you can think of doing? When you are looking through an opening in a curtain and see a mean man coming into your cabin? And when you know there isn’t any door you can dash through to get away?

  Poetry already had the radio shut off, and all of us were as still as scared mice, listening. Also, all of us were trying to peep through the opening in the curtain.

  I noticed that John Till had a new-looking fishing rod, which he stood against the wall by a window. Then he turned his back, reached out of the window, and bent over to pick up something that he had left out there. A moment later I saw what it was—a stringer of fish, looking like five or six big walleyed pike and an extra large northern pike, which he probably caught out in the lake.

  He lifted the stringer, and I heard the fish go ker-flippety-flop-flop into the sink. Then the iron pitcher pump squeaked as if he was pumping water on the fish, maybe to wash the dirt and slime off of them.

  The curtain we were peeping through looked like the material one of my mom’s chenille bedspreads is made out of. It was sort of fuzzy on one side. Even before I heard Dragonfly do what he did just then, I was afraid he would do it. He had his face up close to the curtain, not far from mine, and all of a sudden he got a puzzled expression on his face, his eyes started to squint, his mouth to open, and he made a quick grab for his crooked nose with one of his hands.

  But it was too late. Out came a loud sneeze, which he tried to smother and didn’t. It sounded the way his sneezes nearly always sound—like a Fourth of July firecracker that didn’t explode but just went ssss-sh-sh instead.

  John Till jumped as if he’d been shot at and hit. He whirled around and looked through the main room and at the curtain behind which we were hiding. If it had still been raining hard, he wouldn’t have heard us, maybe, but Dragonfly’s sneeze se
emed to have been timed with a lull in the rain. In spite of the fact that it was a smothered hissing noise, the sneeze was loud enough to be heard.

  I expected most anything terribly exciting and dangerous to happen.

  First, John Till took a wild look around as though he wanted to make a dash for a door or a window and disappear. He must have thought better of it, though, because then he fumbled at his belt, and in a second I saw in his right hand a fierce-looking knife, just like the kind Barry carried. Its wicked-looking blade was about five inches long and looked as if it could either slice a fish into steaks or do the same to a boy.

  Not a one of us had any weapons except our pocket knives. And also not a one of us was going to be foolish enough to start a fight. If only we could make a dash for the door and get out—if the door wasn’t nailed shut, I thought. Then we could run like scared deer and get away.

  But there wasn’t a chance in the world—not against a fierce man with a fierce-looking hunting knife in his hand.

  Then big John Till’s voice boomed into our room and said, “All right, whoever you are. Come out with your arms up!”

  “What’ll we do?” Dragonfly’s trembling whisper asked me, but I already had my arms up, and in a second he had his spindly arms pointed in different directions toward the ceiling.

  “Get ’em up!” I whispered to all of us. If we got a chance, I thought, we could make a dive for the open kitchen window and head for camp terribly fast.

  But Poetry’s forehead was puckered with a very stubborn pucker, and before I knew what he was going to do, he yelled, “Come on out on the porch and get us!”

  Of course, we weren’t on the front porch, and it didn’t make sense at all until a little later.

  As you know, Poetry’s voice was changing. Part of the time it was a bass voice, and the other part of the time it was a soprano, because he was old enough to be what my dad called an “adolescent.” Part of what Poetry said was in a man’s voice and sounded pretty fierce, but right in the middle of the sentence his voice changed, and it was like a scared woman’s voice, the kind that would have made Dragonfly think it was a ghost’s voice if he had heard it in the middle of a dark night in an old abandoned house.