Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 1-6 Read online

  “Then the Little Hiawatha

  Learned of every bird its language,

  Learned their names and all their secrets;

  How they built their nests in summer,

  How they hid themselves in winter;

  Talked with them whene’er he met them,

  Called them Hiawatha’s chickens.”

  Poetry had finished the first verse and was starting the second when something came swinging down from above and landed right on top of him. Circus had caught hold of the top of the elm sapling where he was sitting and swung himself out. The top of the tree had bent right over to the ground and brought him down with it. When he let go, the treetop flew right back up again.

  In another minute we were all trying it, each one climbing a tree and swinging from one to another or down to the ground, whichever we wanted to do. You can do that with elm trees, you know.

  But all this was just wasting time, so pretty soon Poetry looked at me, and I looked at him. We decided to ask Big Jim to call the meeting to order so Poetry could show us what he’d found yesterday.

  First though, Big Jim opened his package, and there was a whole packet of paper drinking cups. We knew right away what they were for. We’d studied in school about how everyone ought to have individual drinking cups for health reasons.

  Big Jim picked up the old rusty cup that was sitting there on the rock and which everybody in the county had used for years maybe. We all stood solemnlike, wondering what he was going to do. First he held it up for us to see, and then he said dramatically, “You can never tell when someone is going to drink out of it—someone who has some terrible disease maybe—and then the next person who uses the cup may become infected.”

  Then Big Jim set the cup down on a rock, and with another rock he pounded and hammered it until he’d smashed it all flat. Then he tossed it into the weeds, and pretty soon we had a sign up that said, “Please use paper drinking cups.” When we were finished, the rest of the cups were fastened up on a tree by the spring in a little tin container just like you see sometimes in public places.

  All of a sudden Poetry was gone, and then a minute later he came hobbling down the hill like an old man, with the long beard and long white hair and dark glasses on.

  Dragonfly pinched me on the arm so hard I couldn’t help but say, “Ouch,” and then I shut up like a clam.

  “Howdy, boys,” Poetry said in the quavering voice of an old man. “Do you reckon maybe a feller can get a drink of water at the spring here?”

  Little Jim looked as white as a sheet. Circus’s monkey face was as sober as a funeral. I thought even Big Jim looked a little bit worried, for he was a boy even if he was our leader. He wasn’t so much bigger than Poetry at that. Dragonfly and I were holding our hands over our mouths to keep from laughing.

  “Where’s my old rusty tin cup?” Poetry’s voice quavered, and it didn’t sound anymore like Poetry than anything.

  But then Circus saw his bare feet and noticed how big and round he was. Two seconds later, Poetry was standing bareheaded and looking surprised and disgusted, and Circus was already trying the disguise on himself to see how he would look.

  Well, Big Jim called a meeting, and Poetry, Dragonfly, and I told the others everything we knew, even to the radio announcement. Big Jim took it all pretty calmly, but I could see he was as much excited on the inside as the rest of us.

  “Maybe I’d better run home and ask Mother if I can go,” Little Jim said.

  “Not much, you don’t!” Circus said. “It’s going to be a secret. Now, if you’re afraid—”

  “I’m not afraid!” Little Jim shouted bravely.

  Of course, he was afraid, and so were all of us, but a boy likes to be scared a little bit. It feels good.

  So pretty soon we were there, right down along the swamp, walking cautiously toward the old hollow sycamore tree.

  7

  It was Dragonfly who saw the man first, for, as I told you, he had the sharpest eyes of any of us.

  “Psst!” he hissed. “There’s a funny-looking man!” He dropped flat on the ground, which was a signal for all of us to do the same thing. It didn’t do Poetry much good to lie down, though, because anybody couldn’t help but see him.

  There was a man all right, about twenty yards from the sycamore and walking straight toward it—or rather he was just walking along kind of lazylike but going toward the tree just the same. He was whistling a tune that sounded like “Old Black Joe.”

  Big Jim turned his face around toward us, raised a finger to his lips, and said, “Sh!” And his eyes said, “Don’t you dare make a noise, any of you!” Then he handed the binoculars back to me. I noticed particularly that the man looked awful young to be a bank robber and that he had coal black hair.

  When we’d all had a look with the binoculars, we knew that something was really mysterious, for the man was poking around inside the old tree.

  “He’s looking for something,” Poetry said, maybe thinking of the whiskers and the glasses and the wig.

  It’s a good thing the grass was tall where we were, or the man might have seen us. For suddenly he stopped what he was doing and looked around quick as if he’d heard something. Then he walked away, following the creek and still whistling. Something must have scared him, though, for pretty soon he started to run for all he was worth.

  I guess we lay there for maybe five minutes more, waiting for Big Jim to say we could get up. I could tell from the expression on his face that he was thinking hard. Then he said, “It won’t do for us to act like we know anything special. Let’s just get up and act natural like a bunch of boys having a good time.”

  Circus was about the only one of us that didn’t have any trouble acting natural when he was trying to. He yawned, stretched, and said, “Boy, it feels good to lie here in the shade.” Only there wasn’t any shade there at all except what Poetry made.

  So with all of us acting natural, or nearly so, we just moved along gang fashion until we got to the tree. Big Jim made us all stand back and keep on trying to act natural, which was pretty hard to do. We could hear him feeling around the hole in the tree with Little Jim’s stick. Pretty soon he let out a low whistle, and I saw him shove something into his pocket and keep right on digging around. There was a strange look on his face when he came back to where we were.

  Then all of a sudden there was a gunshot up the creek. Then another. And another!

  It didn’t take us long to get back to the spring, I can tell you, for that look on Big Jim’s face and those gunshots scared us plenty. We were all so excited we could hardly talk, which was all right because we were supposed to do nothing but run anyway, which we did.

  At the spring we sat down to rest, and Big Jim took a dirty brown envelope out of his pocket. He started to open it. And then we all jumped, for we could hear footsteps coming up along the top of the hill.

  We sat there so tense we couldn’t move. But then Big Jim shoved the envelope into his pocket and started whistling. Poetry rolled over on his side, yawned, and said, “Boy, I’m sleepy:

  “In winter, I get up at night,

  And dress by yellow candlelight;

  In summer, quite the other way

  I have to go to bed by day.”

  Little Jim slid over to Big Jim, and his right hand crept into Big Jim’s hand, probably so he wouldn’t feel so scared. Circus and Dragonfly started a wrestling match, and I took my binoculars and focused them on a snake that was swimming along in the creek.

  The snake must have seen or heard us, for he ducked under the water and didn’t come up again until he was almost all the way across and about ten feet farther down the creek.

  All this time, the footsteps were coming nearer.

  I guess we were all pretty relieved when we looked up and saw it was just my dad, with a big pail in his hand, coming for spring water. He stood looking at us, at our sign on the tree, and at the paper drinking cups. Then he filled his pail and said casual-like, “You’d better c
ome home at five-thirty tonight, Bill. This is Thursday, you know.”

  You see, Thursday night is prayer meeting night in our church. Some kids might think it’s kind of goofy to go to prayer meeting, but I didn’t because I’d been going ever since I was old enough to be carried there. And when you’ve got a mother and father like mine, you think prayer meeting on Thursday night is all right. In fact, I felt sorry for Circus’s folks. They didn’t go any place on Thursday nights except to places where they shouldn’t—Circus’s dad especially. He was always getting drunk. Circus’s mom really tried to be a good mother. They had several children, and all of them girls but one.

  Circus’s folks didn’t know anything at all about the Bible. It didn’t seem fair for a boy to have that kind of parents, but that’s the kind Circus had. All he knew about the Bible was what he’d learned from Little Jim and Poetry and me, but mostly from Little Jim. Circus had quit swearing because Little Jim didn’t like to hear it. Circus was the only one of our gang that did swear. And as quick as Circus knew it was wrong, he quit.

  Just as my dad reached the top of the hill with his pail of water, he turned around and said without even sounding excited, “Maybe you boys would be interested to know that about twenty minutes ago the sheriff caught a boy bank robber down along the swamp. The robber is on his way to the hospital to get well of his wounds—they had to shoot him. And then it’ll be jail.”

  Little Jim looked pale. When Dad was gone he said, “I hope he doesn’t die without being sorry. Mother says unless a man repents of his sin and lets Jesus come into his heart before he dies, he won’t ever be saved and can’t go to heaven at all!”

  After Little Jim said that, we all kept still for a minute, thinking different things. I wondered whether the bank robber’s mother would go to jail to see him. How awful it would make her feel to have that kind of a boy. I wished every boy in the world had a mother like mine or Little Jim’s or Poetry’s. I bet there wouldn’t be many bad boys in the world if they did.

  We decided we’d better find a more secluded place than the spring before we opened that brown envelope. At the spring you can never tell when somebody’s going to come for a drink. So we climbed to the top of a high hill over on the east side of the woods and stood around the big rock where we sometimes had our meetings. In a few minutes we were looking at a rough drawing of some kind with scrawly writing on it.

  Right in the middle of the page was a bed that looked like a hospital bed, and in the bed was an old man with a nurse standing there holding a glass of water. The old man was saying, “More, please.” Alongside the bed was a funny, crooked line, twisting along like a snake, and a little bird was in a tree close by, singing, “Sweet, sweet, sweet.” There were letters and numbers and other lines running off from the one that looked like a snake.

  “It doesn’t make sense!” Poetry exclaimed.

  It looked like he was right.

  I kept watching Big Jim’s face, for I knew he was thinking. Big Jim had the kindest face you ever saw, with clear blue eyes and a chin that had a big dimple right in the middle of it.

  There wasn’t any sense to my noticing the black fuzz on his upper lip when I should have been thinking about the map, or whatever it was supposed to be, unless it was because some people call other people’s faces “maps.” Anyway, I was thinking that Big Jim was old enough, almost, to begin shaving, and I envied his being that old. That little mustache meant that Big Jim was almost a man. I guess every boy can hardly wait until he gets to be a man.

  Again it was Dragonfly who saw it first. Suddenly he was jumping up and down and hollering. “I’ve got it! I’ve got it!”

  Big Jim shushed him up quick—all of us did, in fact.

  “Look!” Dragonfly said, more quietly. “That nurse standing there means the old man is sick! He’s asking for more water, and—and if you put sick and more together you have sycamore! It stands for that old tree!”

  I guess we were all pretty excited right that minute, and we must have made a lot of noise because Big Jim said, “Calm down!”

  Now that Dragonfly had seen it, it was as plain as day to the rest of us.

  “And—and—and—” Dragonfly stuttered, “that snake crawling is a river. And the bird singing, ‘Sweet, sweet, sweet,’ means Sugar Creek!”

  Figuring out that map was just like fitting together a jigsaw puzzle. Only it was harder. We were all sitting there on the rock now with the map spread out between us, racking our brains to decide what the other funny lines and words meant.

  From the tree in the drawing there was an arrow with the number 20 written on it, pointing straight east—that is, if the directions on the map were the same as those on any ordinary map.

  At the end of the arrow was the word China, and that didn’t make any sense. Not until Little Jim said, quietlike, as if he was afraid somebody would make fun of his idea, “My daddy’s brother is a missionary in China, and Daddy says China’s right straight down through the center of the earth.”

  Without knowing it, he had solved the puzzle for us, for that meant go twenty feet east and dig straight down, and there we’d find whatever it was—the money, maybe, which had been stolen from the bank.

  We all jumped up and started toward the sycamore tree with Big Jim in the lead. Having to go slow because Little Jim couldn’t run as fast as the rest of us, we got there in about six minutes or a little more.

  Well, there we were without a ruler or a tape measure, so how could we know how far twenty feet was without something to measure with? We weren’t nearly as scared as we had been when we were at the sycamore the first time, since we knew the robber had been caught. But we were plenty excited.

  “Somebody’ll have to run home for a ruler or a tape measure,” Big Jim said.

  We all looked at each other. None of us wanted to go, knowing it was so near supper time that whoever went might not get to come back. His folks might not understand how important this was, and he couldn’t tell them.

  “Let’s roll Poetry over seven times, and that’d make twenty-one feet ’cause he’s three feet round,” Circus suggested.

  Poetry turned red and gave Circus a savage look. “I’m thirty-five inches,” he said disgustedly, “and you wouldn’t know your arithmetic well enough to divide twenty feet by thirty-five inches.”

  “I’m just four feet tall,” Little Jim said.

  In a jiffy he was lying down with his feet against the sycamore tree and with his body pointing straight east. Well, that looked like a good idea, so we just used Little Jim for a measuring stick, and soon we were what we supposed to be twenty feet from the tree. Poetry lay down and rolled over seven times too, just to show he was a good sport, and there wasn’t much difference between the two measurements.

  But we knew that somehow we’d figured wrong. All around, the grass was fresh and green, and nobody had ever buried anything there unless it was a long time ago. So maybe the map meant twenty yards instead of twenty feet?

  Big Jim looked at his watch, then at me, and said, “It’s five-thirty. We’ll all have to go home to supper.”

  Of course, we felt pretty disappointed, but we agreed to meet again the next afternoon at one o’clock, if we could. Big Jim would bring along a fifty-foot tape measure, his father being a carpenter.

  “I’ll bring a gunnysack to put the money in,” Little Jim volunteered.

  We didn’t laugh at him, because sometimes his ideas turned out to be all right.

  8

  Maybe I never told you that Poetry was my very best friend, but he was. When I got home and had helped Dad with the chores and we were eating supper, the phone rang. It was Poetry’s parents, saying that if we’d like to, we could ride to church with them in their new car.

  I was glad. That meant Poetry and I could sit together in church—that is, if we’d promise to be good and not get into mischief. But it would be a hard promise for any boy to keep-especially if he was sitting beside Poetry—even in church. His being mischievous
didn’t mean he was a bad boy, though. I knew he wasn’t. Some boys are made different from others, I guess, and Poetry was that kind.

  Right after supper, Dad had me drive the cows down the lane to the pasture. “Be sure to shut the gate and hook it good and tight,” he called to me just as I left the barnyard with our five big Holstein milk cows.

  “I will,” I called back.

  With a long stick, which I always used when I was driving the cows, I trudged along happily, thinking about tomorrow and wondering what we’d find or if the map had been drawn by some crazy person and didn’t have anything to do with the bank robbery at all. That was about the oldest and dirtiest envelope I’d ever seen, and the map looked as if it had been drawn a hundred years ago—well, twenty years ago anyway, or maybe ten.

  I heard Mom’s voice calling me to hurry or we’d be late for church. When I got up close to the house, I heard her complaining a little to Dad, saying, “Whatever makes that boy so irresponsible?” or some such long word.

  And Dad said, “He’s a dreamer. He’ll be all right if we give him time.”

  Pretty soon Poetry’s family was there, and we were all in their car going up the road lickety-sizzle toward our church, which was maybe two miles from where we lived. We boys all lived out in the country in about the prettiest spot in the world, I reckon. Right across the road from the church, which was a country church, was a three-room schoolhouse. It wasn’t the school we all went to—we had a little one-room school of our own right in our neighborhood.

  It didn’t take us long to get there. It wasn’t even dark yet, and our car was the first one to drive into the big wide churchyard and park. Soon people came from all directions, and then the service began.

  Poetry and I held the songbook together, and I noticed he didn’t look at the page more than half the time. He just growled along, singing a sort of bass, knowing most of the words from memory, since he liked poetry so well.