Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 13-18 Page 12

  To make matters worse, Dragonfly sneezed again, and we knew we were found out for sure.

  Maybe John Till really thought we were out on that front porch. All of a sudden he left the sink, where he’d been pumping water on his fish. With his big knife in his hand, he charged out of the kitchen and through the main room, dodging the table and the Morris chair, and made straight for the porch.

  And that was our signal to make a run for the kitchen and the open window. Poetry let the baby-sized radio plump down on the roll-away bed. Even as I led the mad dash to the window, I noticed that the radio’s side panel had dropped open. And that was what turned it on.

  Most of us got to the window at the same time. My acrobatic goat grabbed the kitchen table and shoved it into the doorway between the kitchen and the main room to block John Till’s way if he tried to come back quick and stop us. Poetry was out first, then Dragonfly, then Circus, and Robinson Crusoe last of all. In the seconds the others took to get out, I got a glimpse of the big stringer of fish John Till had caught and which was right that second covered with water in the sink. The northern pike was especially very pretty. Before I left the North this summer, I wanted to catch a big fish, have it mounted by a taxidermist, and then put it on the wall of my room back at Sugar Creek.

  I didn’t understand why John Till—as soon as he found out we weren’t out on that porch but had tricked him—didn’t come dashing madly back and jump over the table in the doorway and grab the last ones of us to get through the window. But he didn’t, and I was too scared to stop to find out why.

  We raced around the corner of that cabin, made four dives in the direction we knew the broken-twig trail went, and sped through the still-sprinkling rain, through the wet shrubbery, and under the trees that were dripping water like a leaky roof, and headed for camp.

  Was I ever glad we had our trail of broken branches to go by. When we got to the first one, Dragonfly, whose feet were getting wet, as were all of ours, stopped and made a grab for his nose. I knew he was allergic to something—maybe to wet feet. When he’d finished his sneeze, he said, sniffing at something he couldn’t see, but which he knew was there, “I still smell something—d–dead!—something in that direction over there!”

  I sniffed in that direction, and there was that same dead smell that we’d smelled in the cabin. But this time it was mixed up with the friendly odor of a woods after a rain.

  My roly-poly goat smelled in the same direction, and so did my acrobatic goat, and we all smelled the same very unpleasant odor of something dead.

  “I wonder who it is,” Poetry said, and Dragonfly looked as if he was thinking about a ghost again.

  And then I heard music coming from somewhere—in fact, from the direction of the cabin we’d been in, and I knew it was the radio, which had plopped open when my roly-poly goat had left it in a hurry. Though I couldn’t hear the words, I recognized the tune, and it was “Since Jesus Came into My Heart.”

  We hurried on, following our trail, happy that we had managed to get out of trouble so easily. But we wondered aloud to each other if old hook-nosed John Till had had anything to do with the kidnapping, if maybe he knew where the ransom money was, and why he hadn’t come rushing back into the kitchen to catch us.

  “I think I know why,” Circus said. “He’s just like my dad was before he was saved. He couldn’t stand to see a bottle of whiskey without taking a drink. And I’ll bet when he saw that half-empty bottle out on the porch, he just grabbed it up and started gulping it down.”

  Then Circus, being a little bashful about talking about things like that, as some boys sometimes are, looked up at the tree limb extending out over where he was going to walk. He leaped up and caught hold of it with his hands. He chinned himself two or three times, while Dragonfly, who was beside him under the leaves of that branch, let out a yell and said, “Hey, watch out! Quit making it rain on me!”

  That is exactly what Circus had done. The leaves of that branch got most of the water shaken off, and a lot of it fell all over Dragonfly.

  We hurried on, talking and asking questions and trying to figure out what on earth the deadish smell was. Also we were wishing we had all the Gang with us, and a shovel, and time to follow the other trail of broken branches and actually find the ransom money right now.

  In a little while we came to the place where we’d first found the envelope with the invisible-ink map in it. There we stopped for a minute and looked all around to be sure we would remember the place when we came back.

  And about twenty minutes later, we came puffing into camp in sunshiny weather. The sky had cleared after the storm, but we were as wet as drowned rats.

  The minute the others saw us come sloshing up to our tents, Big Jim called out, “Where on earth have you been?”

  Well, we’d agreed to keep our secret a secret for a while. At least we’d not tell Barry right away. Sooner or later we would tell the rest of the gang—except Tom Till. We might decide to tell Tom too, but we wouldn’t if Big Jim said not to, because it might spoil Tom’s vacation, and then he wouldn’t have any fun the rest of our camping trip.

  Dragonfly answered Big Jim’s questions in a mischievous voice by saying, “Bill’s been walking on my neck, and Poetry and Circus have been making soup out of me, and I am a native boy,” which wouldn’t make sense to anyone who didn’t know about Crusoe, his man Friday, and the cannibals.

  As soon as we could, we changed to dry clothes, and Big Jim took command of us by saying, “OK, boys, I’m in charge of camp for the rest of the day. Barry got a terribly important letter in the mail an hour ago, and he’s had to go to Bemidji. He’ll be back in time for our campfire get-together.”

  Well, if there was anything I liked better than anything else, it was to be alone with only our gang, when it can be its own boss, even though we all liked Barry a lot and would do anything he said anytime.

  “Bill’s my boss,” Dragonfly said.

  I looked at Dragonfly and then at Big Jim and winked.

  Big Jim grinned back and then said to all of us, “Let’s get the camp chores done.” He gave commands to different ones of us to do different things. Poetry and I had the job of burying the entrails and heads of some fish that Barry had caught and which had just been cleaned before he left. That is the best thing to do with fish heads and other parts of the fish that you aren’t going to eat.

  “The shovel’s in Barry’s tent,” Big Jim said, and a minute later Poetry and I were on our way up along the shore to the burying place.

  We hadn’t gone far when we heard somebody coming behind us on the run, and it was Dragonfly, with an excited face, who said, “You crazy goofs! You going to dig for the treasure without letting me go along?”

  “Why, hello, my man Friday!” I said pleasantly and told him what we were having to do. “Here—you carry the shovel and do the digging.”

  And Poetry said, “You can carry these fish insides.” And with that he handed him the small pail he’d been carrying.

  But Dragonfly wouldn’t do that, so I let him disobey for once.

  When we got to the place, we saw all kinds of little mounds of fresh dirt where other fish entrails had been buried. And then all of a sudden Poetry said, “There’s fish heads scattered all over the ground here!”

  I looked, and he was right. All around were old half-eaten bullheads, and the eyes and ugly noses of walleyed pike, and two or three spatulate-shaped snouts of big northern pike.

  Dragonfly said, “Somebody’s been digging them up—” And then he grabbed his nose just in time to stop most of what might have been several very noisy sneezes.

  “I—ker-chew!—I smell—ker-chew!—s–some-thing d–dead.”

  Well, that was that, and I got a sinking feeling in my stomach, because right away I knew that what we’d smelled back in and around the mystery cabin was maybe something like this.

  “It’s raccoons,” I heard a voice saying behind us and recognized it as Circus’s voice. Since his pop wa
s a hunter, Circus would know about coons’ habits.

  “Big Jim sent me to tell you guys to bury them deep, because the chipmunks and coons have been digging them all up again.”

  Well, we buried our stuff very deep, each one of us doing a little bit, but for some reason I wasn’t feeling very happy. I was beginning to feel that all the mystery and excitement we’d been having and which had been getting more exciting every minute, was all made out of our own imagination.

  “Do you suppose that map with invisible ink on it was only maybe showing somebody where a fish cemetery is?” Poetry asked, and I felt terribly sad inside. We all looked at each other with sad eyes and felt even sadder.

  “Then Tom’s dad is only up here on a fishing trip, and he’s maybe rented the old cabin from somebody for a while,” I said.

  We went back to camp feeling dreadfully down.

  After supper and when it was almost dark, it was time for Eagle Eye’s bloodcurdling Indian story. We knew that since he was a Christian Indian, he would tell us a Bible story too, which is one reason why our parents had wanted us to come on this camping trip in the first place.

  Every night before we tumbled into bed, we would listen to a short talk from the Bible, and then somebody would lead us in prayer. Sometimes somebody gave us a talk about what boys ought to know about themselves and God, and how God expected everybody in the world to behave themselves—things like that. Not a one of the gang was sissified enough to be ashamed of being a Christian, and, as you know, every single one of us nearly always carried his New Testament with him wherever he went.

  So we started our evening campfire, which was going to be what is called an “Indian fire.” It was after Eagle Eye’s story that I found out about Little Tom’s terribly sad heart, and I was even gladder than before that he hadn’t been with us that afternoon. I think I never felt so sorry for anybody in my life as I did for red-haired Little Tom Till at the close of our campfire.

  7

  It was fun having our big Indian guest, Eagle Eye, whom we all knew and liked very much, take charge of our meeting. First, he showed us how to build an Indian fire. It was like this: To begin with, he made a little wigwam of some dry tinder and slender sticks and some larger sticks, all stacked up in the shape of a tepee, with the top ends overlapping each other a little. Then he had us boys drag five or six big long poles from a little shelter nearby, where there was a place for keeping wood dry.

  It was interesting to watch him. Just for fun he was wearing real Indian garb, a headband filled with long, different-colored feathers, and clothes that looked like the kind I’d seen in pictures of Indians in our school library.

  As soon as the wigwam fire was laid, but not started yet, he took his bow and arrow and what he called a “fire board,” and in almost no time had a small fire started. It was a pretty sight to watch that little wigwam of tinder and sticks leap into flame and the reddish-yellow tongues of fire go shooting toward the sky. The smoke rose slowly and spread itself out over our camp and sort of hung there like a big, lazy bluish cloud.

  Little Jim and I were sitting side by side, and Tom Till was right across the fire from us. The ground was still wet, so we were sitting on our camp chairs. Since it was a little chilly, I had a blanket wrapped around me and had it spread out to cover Little Jim too, because he was my favorite small guy of the whole gang.

  For some reason, whenever Little Jim was with me, I seemed to be a better boy—or anyway, I wished I was. It was the easiest thing in the world to think about the Bible and God and about everybody needing to be saved and things like that, when Little Jim was with us. And yet he was as much a rough-and-tumble boy as any of the rest of us. I never will forget the way he shot and killed that fierce old mother bear down along Sugar Creek—which you know about if you’ve read Killer Bear.

  “Here’s a good way to save labor,” Eagle Eye told us as soon as our wigwam fire had burned down a little.

  He picked up one of the long thick poles and dragged it to the fire and laid the end of it right across the still burning wigwam. Then he dragged up another pole and laid the end of it across the end of the first one. Pretty soon he had the ends of all the poles crisscrossed on the fire with their opposite ends stretching out in all directions like the spokes of a wagon wheel. Almost right away the big hot flames were leaping up like Circus’s pop’s hungry dogs leaping around a Sugar Creek tree where they’ve treed a coon. It was certainly a pretty sight.

  “Pretty soon, when the ends of the poles are burned up, we’ll push the poles in a little further,” Eagle Eye said, “and you won’t have to chop them in short pieces at all. When you want your fire to go out at bedtime, just pull the poles back from the fire and pour water on the ends.”

  I looked across at my man Friday, and he grinned back at me and said, “I’d rather have him for my boss than Robinson Crusoe himself,” which was maybe half funny, I thought.

  “Tomorrow night, you can use the same poles, and you don’t have to chop,” Eagle Eye explained.

  Then Eagle Eye wrapped his blanket around him and sat down on a log and began his story. First he took out his Bible—he is a missionary, you know, to his own people.

  Before he got started, though, Little Jim, who was cuddled up under my blanket, whispered, “That pretty blue smoke hanging up there—it’s like the pillar of cloud it tells about in the Bible. When it hung above the camp of the people of Israel, it meant God wanted them to stay there awhile. And when it lifted itself up higher, it meant they were supposed to travel on.”

  I’d heard that story many a time in Sunday school or church, and I liked it a lot. I didn’t understand it very well, though, not until that very second when Little Jim, who had his eyes focused on Eagle Eye as he opened his Bible and also on the blue smoke cloud, said in my ear, “I’ll bet the cloud was there to show the people that God loved them and was right there to look after them and take care of them.”

  Imagine that little guy thinking that, but it seemed maybe he was right.

  Then Eagle Eye told his story, which was a different kind of story than I’d expected. It was all about how his father had been such a good father until he learned to drink whiskey. And then one night he had gotten drunk and drove his car into a telephone pole away up at the place where the highway and the sandy road meet. “You boys notice next time you’re there. There’s a cross, which the Highway Commission put there, to remind people that somebody met his death there by a car accident.”

  Eagle Eye stopped talking a minute, and I saw him fumble under his blanket for something. It was a handkerchief, which he used to wipe a couple of quick tears from his eyes. It was the first time I’d ever seen him with tears in his eyes, and I realized that Indians were people like anyone else and could feel sad inside and love their parents the same as anybody else God had made.

  Then my eyes went across the circle to where Tom Till was sitting beside Big Jim, and I saw him swallow hard as though there was a big lump in his throat. He was just staring into the fire as though he wasn’t seeing it at all but was seeing something or somebody very far away. I knew that if he was imagining anything about his father, his thoughts wouldn’t have to travel very far but only to an abandoned old cabin on a lake—but he didn’t know that.

  Then Eagle Eye brought something else from under his blanket, and the minute I saw it I realized it was going to be hard for Tom to sit still and listen. But there it was—a big whiskey bottle with pretty flowers on its very pretty label.

  Eagle Eye held up the bottle in the firelight for us all to see. He said, “This is the enemy that killed my father. I found it half empty in the car where he died. This bottle is responsible for my father’s broken neck and the broken windshield that cut his face beyond recognition.”

  Eagle Eye stopped then. He took the bottle in both of his hands, held it out and looked at it, and shook his head sadly.

  While everything was quiet for a moment, with only the sound of the crackling fire and the sound of
Little Jim’s irregular breathing beside me, I noticed that Tom Till had both fists doubled up tight as if he was terribly mad at something or somebody.

  Then Eagle Eye talked again. “The evil spirit, the Devil, paints all sin pretty, boys, but sin is bad. All sin is bad, and only Jesus can save from sin. You boys pray for my people. Too many of them are learning to drink.”

  Well, the story was finished, and Barry wasn’t back yet to take charge of the last part of our campfire meeting, so I knew Big Jim would have to do it. It was what we called Prayer Time, and just before somebody was supposed to lead us in a prayer, the leader asked questions around the circle, in case any of us had anything or anybody we wanted prayer for.

  So Big Jim took charge and started by saying he wanted us to pray for him, because someday he might want to be a missionary.

  Circus was next, so he spoke up and said, “Everybody thank the Lord for saving my pop from being a drunk.” The very minute he said it, I was both glad and sad and looked quick at Tom Till, who was still staring into the fire with his fists doubled up.

  Dragonfly said, “Pray for my mother.”

  Poetry frowned, trying to think, then said, “For new mission hospitals to be built in foreign countries like Africa and other places.”

  It was Tom Till’s turn next, but he sat with his head down and was looking at his doubled-up fists. I could see he was afraid to say a word for fear his voice would break and he’d cry.

  So Big Jim skipped him, and it was Little Jim’s turn. He piped up from beside me and said in his mouselike voice, “Everybody pray for Shorty Long back home.”

  I certainly was surprised. Shorty Long was the new tough guy who had moved into Sugar Creek territory last winter and had started coming to our school and had caused a terrible lot of trouble for the gang. But that was like Little Jim, praying for someone like that.