Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 13-18 Page 24

  “Let me see the date,” I said. I reached for the paper, but Big Jim jerked his arm away and held the paper at arm’s length.

  Poetry, who happened to be lying in the direction in which Big Jim had stretched out his arm, grabbed the paper and held on, and in a minute we were all seeing the date.

  It was a very old Sugar Creek Times, which had been printed forty years ago. It was yellow with age and musty smelling, but there it was as plain as day—a picture of an old stone house, and the news caption below it said—with a big question mark after it—

  HAUNTED HOUSE?

  I shifted my position, being uncomfortable because of sitting on my left bare foot, and also because of sitting on something kind of hard, which didn’t feel very good to sit on. I shoved my hand under me, worked my fingers down into the matted grass to see what it was, then rolled over quick. It was a flint arrowhead, the kind Indians used many years ago.

  “Hey, gang, look what I found!” I said and held up the triangle-shaped, sharp-edged piece of rock for us all to see. Thinking about the haunted house and Dragonfly, I said in a serious voice, but with a mischievous grin in my mind, “This arrowhead was on the end of an arrow that maybe killed a lot of people a long time ago when Indians lived around here. One man probably was shot right here in the graveyard. And when he fell dead, he fell right where Dragonfly is lying now. The very minute he died, his ghost jumped up and started running around the country until it found a place to live, and when it saw that old house, it decided that was just the place, so it moved in!”

  Poetry knew I was only trying to be funny, so he tried to be the same way and said in an excited voice, “Hey, Dragonfly, get up quick! You’re lying on a ghost.”

  Well, it wasn’t funny to Dragonfly. Poor little guy, he couldn’t help it that he was superstitious, and maybe we shouldn’t have kidded him about it. But we liked Dragonfly a lot, and Dad says if anybody kids you it’s a sign he likes you and be sure not to get mad.

  Dragonfly frowned instead of jumping as we’d expected him to. He got a stubborn look on his face and said, “Yes, and as soon as the ghost found out that it was a ghost, it turned a somersault backwards and knocked the breath out of two or three people.”

  With that, Dragonfly came alive and made a backward somersault in our direction. The next thing I knew, Poetry and I were being bowled over and mauled as if a steamroller had hit us.

  It was good fun, but we still weren’t having quite as much fun as we wanted to, certainly not as much excitement, so we held a gang meeting to decide on something interesting to do.

  “I move we go up into the hills to Old Man Paddler’s cabin and let him tell us an exciting story,” Little Jim said.

  Circus said, “Second the motion,’’ and in a jiffy we had all voted “Yes” and were on our way. It was always fun to go up to Old Man Paddler’s clapboard-roofed cabin in the hills.

  At the rate we ran, it took us only a little while to get to the spring, where we all stopped and got a drink.

  Circus, the fastest runner of any of us, got there first and was down on his knees on a stone beside the bubbling spring when we arrived at the old linden tree and looked down at him.

  “You guys,” he called up to us. “Take a look at this!”

  In a second I was down there beside Circus, frowning at a track of some kind that looked a lot like a baby’s small hand that had its fingers spread and had been pressed down flat in the mud.

  Poetry came puffing down next, with the rest of the gang scrambling after him. The minute he saw the track, he said, “That’s a ghost’s tracks. Look, there are a whole lot of them. See there, Dragonfly?”

  “It’s a wild animal of some kind,” Little Jim said.

  For some reason, I felt a strange, creepy feeling going up and down my spine, the way I get when I’m beginning to be scared.

  Then Big Jim let out a low, surprised whistle and said, “Look at that, will you? It’s got one toe missing!”

  “One finger, you mean,” Poetry said, and either Big Jim or Poetry was right.

  On the other side of the little cement pool that my dad had made there to hold the spring-water—so that anytime anybody wanted to, he could dip in a pail or a cup and get a drink—was a stretch of mud. And the spread toes or fingers of some animal walking on the flat of its hands or feet had made maybe a dozen tracks there.

  “Suppose it’s maybe a bear?” Dragonfly wanted to know.

  “Probably a monstrous coon,” Circus said. “One that’s been caught in a trap, maybe, and lost one of its toes.”

  I’d seen thousands of possum and squirrel and rabbit and coon tracks in my life, but those were the strangest tracks I’d ever seen. And for some reason I was getting the most curious feeling in my mind that I’d had in a long time.

  “Maybe it is a terribly big coon’s tracks,” Little Jim said.

  I wished it was, but the tracks were too big for that, and they were too small for a bear, which we didn’t have in Sugar Creek territory anyway. Also they looked too much as if they’d been made by a baby’s hand, I thought, to be the tracks of any kind of vermin that lived in Sugar Creek.

  Circus, who knew animal tracks better than any of the rest of us, acted worried. “It’s too big for a coon,” he decided, “but I know how to find out for sure.”

  “How?” we asked.

  He said, “I’ll go get old Blue Jay. If it’s a coon, he’ll open up with a wild bawl, and if it’s something else, he’ll just sniff at it and act lazy and disgusted and walk away.”

  “Who’s old Blue Jay?” Dragonfly wanted to know.

  Circus said, “It’s dad’s new bluetick coon-hound, which he just bought. It won’t take me more’n a jiffy. You guys stay right here, but don’t you dare touch those tracks till old Jay’s smelled them.”

  With that, Circus straightened up and scrambled lickety-sizzle up the little incline and past the linden tree. Seconds later I heard him running through the dead leaves and grass as fast as anything.

  Suddenly Big Jim turned to me and said, “Want to go along, Bill?”

  “Sure,” Poetry said, “he wants to go. Go ahead and go with him, Bill.”

  Somehow I felt my redheaded temper starting to get warm, and I wanted to sock something or somebody. I knew they’d said that because all the gang had found out that one of Circus’s many sisters, who was kind of ordinary-looking but was also kind of nice, had sent me a pretty card on my birthday. Also, she was the only one of the different-sized awkward girls that came to our school who sometimes smiled back at me across the schoolroom when I ought to be studying arithmetic and wasn’t.

  But I had already learned that if I acted bothered when the gang teased me like that, then they would tease me even worse, so I said, “Sure, I’ll go. Want to go with me, Dragonfly?”

  He looked up quickly from studying the tracks and shook his head “No” while his raspy voice said “Yes” at the same time. Then he shook his head “No” again, with a kind of ridiculous-looking twist of his neck, and started clambering up the incline toward the linden trees as fast as he could with me right after him.

  At the top, we saw a flash of Circus’s blue overalls in the path that scalloped its way up the creek to the Sugar Creek bridge. We yelled to him to wait, which he did, and pretty soon the three of us were running and panting and talking as we hurried along past oak and maple and beech and all other kinds of trees. Dragonfly was sneezing every now and then, because it was hay fever season and he always was allergic to a lot of things anyway, including ragweed and goldenrod, which grew all along the path.

  I felt terribly bashful as we got close to Circus’s house. All of a sudden I looked ahead and spied something like a girl out in their front yard. I noticed that she was about the size I was and was wearing a red dress that was almost exactly like the one my mom wears around the house sometimes and which Mom says is her favorite housedress. Mom had a pretty red print dress with a zipper front and a belt that tied in the back and two p
ockets up close to the neck, shaped like flowerpots.

  When Circus ran ahead, all of a sudden I got an upside-down notion in my red head that I wanted to climb up on the rail fence that ran along the edge of Circus’s lane and balance myself and walk on the top rail awhile. Before I could have stopped myself from doing it, even if I had known I was going to do it, I was doing it—walking along with my bare feet, balancing myself to keep from falling off. I managed to move in the direction of the red dress with the flowerpot pockets, although I was not able to see the dress very well because I had to watch where I was walking.

  Everything would have been all right if I hadn’t tried to see if I could stand on one leg and hold the other straight out in front of me and make a complete turn by hopping with the other foot. The next thing I knew, I was on the ground on the other side of the fence in Circus’s pop’s cornfield, feeling very foolish and wondering, What on earth?

  I decided to stay there awhile and not let anyone see me, which I did, crawling on my hands and knees between the corn rows toward Circus’s house. All of a sudden, I began to notice the tracks my hands were making in the soft brown dirt. They were almost exactly like those we’d seen at the spring at Sugar Creek, only of course they were a lot larger.

  Then I heard Circus coming back. He had with him the prettiest hound I’d ever seen—a great big, large-boned, straight-legged dog with a silky black head and black ears and a blue-and-white tail that was shaped like a question mark or else maybe like the sickle my dad uses to cut weeds. The rest of the hound was darkish white with small blue spots all over him, clear down to the very end of his toes. The hound had the saddest, lazy expression I ever saw on a dog’s face, but he had kind eyes that looked as though he thought a boy was a good friend.

  I wished Little Jim were there. If there is anything he likes to do better than anything else it is to stroke a friendly dog on the head.

  “Look!” Circus said after we’d been hurrying back up the creek toward the spring. He stopped, while we all caught our breath—especially Dragonfly, who was slower because he had short breath. “See how long his ears are? His ear spread is twenty-four inches from the tip of one ear to the tip of the other.”

  Circus spread the dog’s ears out like a boy spreading out the wings of a pigeon. The hound twisted its head sideways a little, reached up real quick, and licked Circus’s hand. Then, because Circus’s face happened to be close by, he got licked in the face with old Blue Jay’s long red tongue.

  “He’s a genuine bluetick,” Circus said. “Dad paid a hundred dollars for him. He’s the best coonhound we ever had, and he won’t chase anything except coons.”

  “What makes you call him a bluetick?” Dragonfly asked, and I noticed, as he said it, that he twisted his neck again, funnylike.

  Circus said, “Because of these little blue spots all over him. That’s the name dog experts give to that kind of a dog.”

  Well, pretty soon we were there, and Circus took old Blue Jay, with his sickle tail over his back, down the incline to the spring at the base of the leaning linden tree. The rest of us watched to see what he’d do when he smelled the strange-looking tracks.

  “It’s pretty nearly bound to be a coon,” Circus said, “because coons always wash their food before they eat it, and this great big terrible old coon probably stopped there and washed his breakfast this morning.”

  I knew coons did that, so I thought maybe Circus was right.

  I don’t know what I expected Blue Jay to do when he got to the base of the old linden tree and started to smell the funny-looking hand-like tracks of the animal or ghost or whatever it was. I remembered that, even before we got there, Circus had said Blue Jay was a very special kind of coon dog and that you could tell by the sound of his bawl when he was on a trail just what kind of vermin he was following. You could also tell by the sound of his bark whether he was still trailing or whether he had chased the coon or whatever it was to a tree or a den. On the trail it was one kind of bark, and when he was “treed” it was another.

  But I certainly didn’t expect to hear such a weird dog voice.

  The very minute Blue Jay’s nose came within a foot or two of those strange tracks, he began acting very excited and half mad—like a boy when he has walked with his bare feet through a patch of nettles, and his feet and legs itch so much that he can’t stand it.

  Old Blue Jay sniffled and snuffled with a noise like a very small boy who has a cold but doesn’t have any handkerchief. The blue-ticked hair on his back stood up, the way a dog’s hair does when he is angry at another dog or a person or a cat. He didn’t act at all as I’d seen dogs act when they strike an animal’s trail and are trying to decide which way it has gone so as to start following it.

  He lifted his long nose off the ground and let out a long, high-pitched wail that sounded almost like a ghost is supposed to sound at midnight in a haunted house beside an abandoned graveyard.

  The next thing I knew, he had leaped across the puddle of water on the other side of the spring and was running along the edge of Sugar Creek, following the path that ran in the opposite direction from the swimming hole, straight toward the old sycamore tree and the cave. Every few seconds he let out a long, very weird-sounding high-pitched cry. I knew that if I heard it at night along Sugar Creek, it would send cold, bloodcurdling chills up and down my spine—which it was doing right that very minute anyway.

  I had followed a coon chase on quite a few different nights when the Sugar Creek Gang had gone hunting with Circus’s pop and his long-nosed, long-voiced, long-eared, long-tongued, long-legged, long-tailed dogs, and I was all set to follow old Blue Jay on a daytime hunt.

  That hound certainly was a fast trailer. Quick as anything, he was nose-diving up and down the hill, wherever the trail went. Pretty soon he was bawling and running as fast as anything straight down the path toward the old hollow sycamore tree, which grows at the edge of the swamp and where our gang had so many exciting experiences.

  We galloped along after him, stopping now and then when it seemed he had lost the trail. Whenever he lost it, he began running around in every direction, circling chokecherry shrubs and papaw bushes and wild rosebushes and brier patches and diving in and out of little thickets until he found the trail again. But he still kept going in the general direction of the swamp and the sycamore tree.

  “It’s a coon,” Big Jim said, “and it’s heading for the old sycamore tree.”

  “How can you tell it’s a coon?” Dragonfly said from behind us, running as close to me as he could and having a hard time to keep up.

  “Yeah, how can you?” Poetry puffed from beside me somewhere.

  And Big Jim said, “I can’t for sure, but he acts as crazy as a coon dog is supposed to act when it’s on a coon trail.”

  Well, I knew that Circus, who knew more about his dad’s hound than any of the rest of us did, would maybe know, so I asked him.

  He said between puffs as he dashed along with me, “I don’t know. If it’s a coon, I’d think it wouldn’t go in such crazy circles.”

  3

  Soon we came to the old North Road, and there Blue Jay ran into trouble. He leaped over the rail fence as if he weighed only twenty pounds instead of ninety-five and began running up and down the side ditches on both sides of the road, acting worried and trying to find where “whatever it was” had gone.

  Little Jim spoke up and said, “I’ll bet if it made those tracks at the spring early this morning when it was washing its breakfast, and that if it crossed the road here a whole lot later, a lot of different cars and horses and wagons have run over the tracks, and Jay can’t smell ’em.”

  “Yeah,” Circus said, “but they didn’t run out in the ditch on the other side of the road.”

  Try as he would, old Blue Jay couldn’t find the trail. It was as if the coon or “whatever it was” had come to the road here and then just disappeared.

  After five or ten minutes of worried circling and whimpering, Blue Jay came ba
ck to where we were, looked up at Circus, and whined as much as to say, “Well, that’s that. What do we do next? I give up.”

  Dragonfly spoke up then, and I noticed that his voice had a sort of tremble in it as he said, “M–maybe when it got here, it stopped walking, and began floating in the air like ghosts do.”

  I looked at his dragonflylike eyes, and that little spindle-legged guy had an expression on his face that said he actually wondered if maybe it had been a ghost!

  Although we kept on trying to get Blue Jay interested, we couldn’t. He just acted as though it was all over, so all of us went on down past the sycamore tree and up into the hills to Old Man Paddler’s house, as we’d planned to do in the first place, to get him to tell us an exciting story. We took Blue Jay along so we wouldn’t have to go all the way back to Circus’s house with him and also so we could get to Old Man Paddler’s house quicker.

  We didn’t stay very long at Old Man Paddler’s cabin because it seemed we had interrupted him in his work. He must have heard us coming, just as we were stopping to get a drink at the spring that comes tumbling out of the rocky hillside below his house. He opened the wooden door and just stood there quietly, without moving or saying a word at first.

  I had finished getting a drink and was looking around to see if there were any ghost’s tracks or any other kind, and there weren’t. Then I’d heard the door open.

  I looked at the old-fashioned clapboard-roofed cabin with the white-whiskered old man standing in the open doorway. In a flash my mind was seeing a picture in our Bible storybook at home of a man named Moses. He was a very important person to whom God had given the Ten Commandments, which every boy in the world ought to learn by heart and also ought to obey.

  In just that minute he was standing there, I remembered some of the different places I’d seen him and what he’d been doing. Once we’d saved his life, you know, which I told you about in the very first story of the Sugar Creek Gang. Also, every Sunday morning in the church we all went to, that old man would come in and sit down close to the front, sometimes coming just a little late.