Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 25-30 Read online

  I was stretched out on the ground, as you remember, when there came floating in from some direction or other a long, high-pitched, trembling cry like a lonely loon calling across a north woods lake. It also maybe sounded like Alexander the Coppersmith when he was running with the hounds on a red-hot coon or fox trail.

  “Circus,” I mumbled, knowing there never had been any loons in Sugar Creek territory and remembering that Circus, our acrobat, could mimic most any bird or animal he’d ever heard.

  Seconds later I heard the loon call again, this time from behind us, where there was a little thicket of elm saplings. I rolled over, opened my sluggish eyes, focused them in that direction, and there Circus was, swaying back and forth in the top of a little elm, getting ready to do what I’d seen him do many a time—reach up to the very top branch of the baby elm, swing his body out, and ride the green-leafed bronco down to the ground. And right that minute, he did it. He landed with an easy plop and let the sapling swing back up again as fast as a boy straightens up from digging bad weeds in the garden when his mother rings her handbell that dinner is ready.

  But something else happened right then that knocked most of the sleep out of me. Again I heard that lonely, long, wailing squall, and it hadn’t come from Circus Browne but from somewhere above or around us. And from two different directions at the same time! Also, it did not sound like a red-throated loon on a north woods lake giving a twilight mating call. It did sound like Alexander the Coppersmith on a coon or fox trail. And it had come, not at night, but in the middle of a hot summer afternoon!

  What on earth! I thought and was wide awake. Very, very wide awake.

  4

  Three boys in the shade of the beechnut tree, thirty feet from the Black Widow Stump, forty feet from the leaning linden tree, stared at each other’s startled faces and listened as hard as they could in every out direction there is, as well as all around up.

  Had we actually heard a dog howling, or had we only thought we had? And if we had, was the dog a ghost dog or a real one?

  For maybe forty-nine seconds, which seemed like that many minutes, all we heard was the droning of hundreds of honeybees working the creamy yellow, very fragrant flowers of the leaning linden tree, and the musical gurgling of the lively water in the spring, and the cracked cawing of a croaking crow.

  An instant later, nature let loose with two of her other voices: a turtledove’s sad “coo-o, coo-oo,” and the harsh, grating “kow-kow-kow, kuk-kuk” of a rain crow, which nearly always sings before or after a rain or even when the weather is just damp.

  “Maybe that’s what we heard,” Poetry said in a disgruntled voice, “not a howling dog. We all know it couldn’t have been Alexander the Coppersmith, because dead dogs are dead, and there isn’t any such thing as a ghost dog, anyway.”

  So that was that, and a very disappointing that, at that. We’d heard a mourning dove and a black-billed rain crow in one of nature’s duets and only thought we had heard a howling dog.

  We settled down to waiting for the rest of the gang. A few minutes later we again heard the lonely “coo-o, coo-oo” and the harsh, grating “kow-kow-kow, kuk-kuk” from the trees that bordered the bayou. It still sounded for all the world like the lonely wail of a lost ghost dog. But this time the cracked voice of the croaking crow joined in to make it a trio instead of a duet: a mourning dove soprano, a rain crow alto, and the rasping, high-pitched tenor of the cawing crow.

  Ho-hum! Maybe it was because we all wanted something exciting to do or to worry about that it was a big letdown, like blowing up a monster soap bubble only to have it all of a sudden burst and spatter your face with what is left of it.

  Poetry went back to doing what he had been doing, turning the pages of the Hoosier Graphic and reading different things. I went back to what I had been doing, which was trying to catch up on wanted sleep, and Circus, after turning a couple of cartwheels, dropped down panting beside me.

  “You guys want to hear the society news?” Poetry’s squawking ducklike voice asked. Without waiting for us to say yes or no, he began to read from what is called the society column, which is always Mom’s first place in the paper to read.

  “Seneth Paddler left Friday for his annual vacation in California … Several local residents have revived the flying saucer mystery by reporting seeing strange-colored lights in the swamp below the Paddler cabin. A saucer-shaped object above the Sugar Creek cave was seen moving silently in widening circles, then hovering for a full three minutes before taking off into the sky. One longtime resident in the area, driving across the Sugar Creek bridge about ten o’clock Sunday night, spotted the UFO in the eastern sky and phoned the sighting to this reporter. This is not copy for a society column unless visitors from another planet or from outer space might be accepted as news—if it is news. Is it, or isn’t it? Any of our readers seen any new UFOs lately? Flying boxcars, saucers, mobile homes, winged turtles, little green men wearing little green hats?”

  Even though I was too sleepy to be angry at what Poetry was reading and at the sarcastic way of writing about what I guessed Dragonfly’s mother had maybe reported, I wished Dragonfly was right and that we ourselves could actually see a real UFO. Dragonfly was a member of the gang, and even though we often teased him about his superstitions, we would fight for him anytime-kind of the way I would fight with my sister Charlotte Ann but also would fight for her if anybody else said anything about her or was even one-tenth as ornery to her as I sometimes was.

  It was still quite a while before most of the rest of the gang would be there, so I eased myself into Wynken, Blynken, and Nod’s boat and started to sail away again, letting nature help me all she could.

  Again, from behind me Poetry’s unwelcome voice broke into my sleep world, as he quoted at me a Bible verse every boy and even every girl in the world ought to know and obey. It was: “Go to the ant, O sluggard, observe her ways and be wise.”

  “Go to the ant yourself,” I mumbled and drifted away again.

  I got waked up too soon by the crunchety-crunch-crunch of running footsteps coming from the direction of our house.

  Forcing my mind and my eyes open, I saw Little Jim Foote in tan jeans and white T-shirt, trotting along. He was carrying his striped ash stick, which looked like a three-foot-long candy cane without any crook at the top. He’d made the cane, I remembered, by peeling off strips of the gray bark with his Scout knife.

  You hardly ever saw Little Jim without his stick. He was always swinging it around, using it to sock different things, whatever he wanted to whenever he wanted to, and sometimes he would kill a snake with it. There were quite a few different kinds of snakes in the territory, especially along the creek and in the swamp. The stick was also good for reaching up and knocking an apple off a tree or jabbing into a bumblebee’s nest just before you took off on a fast run in some direction or other to get out of the way of maybe thirty-seven angry, black-and-yellow, long-tongued, sharp-stingered winged fighters.

  Every time I see a bumblebee I remember the fight our gang had with a tough town gang on the slope of Strawberry Hill. That fight had rolled and tumbled us all onto a bumblebee nest, and almost before we knew it the fight was over. I also remember Dad’s strict orders to me and to the gang not to kill even one bumblebee, because they were needed by the farmers to help pollinate the red clover, which can only be pollinated by bees with extralong tongues.

  In a few seconds Little Jim, panting, had plopped himself down on the ground between Poetry and me. My olfactory nerves came to life when I smelled the flowers he carried. They didn’t smell as sweet as Little Jim’s mother’s perfume. “Where’d you get the black-eyed Susans?” I asked him.

  “Up by the papaw bushes,” he answered. “I’m going to put ’em on Alexander’s grave.”

  I squinted my eyes at his bouquet of black-and-yellow flowers, which he already had in a quart glass jar half full of water.

  And then there was the crunch-crunch-crunching sound of another boy’s feet, runni
ng from the direction of the bayou. Almost at the same time, a long-tailed sneeze told us it was ragweed season and that Dragonfly’s hay fever had started. A split second later there was the turtledove’s “coo-o, coo-oo,” and at almost the very same time came the harsh, rattling, grating “kow-kow-kow, kuk-kuk” of the rain crow.

  As Dragonfly came puffing into our circle, he was as excited as I had ever seen him. “D’you guys hear that? It’s Alexander the Coppersmith! He’s come to life. My mother heard him last night!”

  I straightened up, rested on my elbow, looked that crooked-nosed, excited little member of our gang in his dragonfly-like eyes, and disagreed. “Dead dogs don’t come back to life. What you heard just now was a turtledove and a rain crow doing a duet, not a dead dog howling and barking at the same time from somewhere up in two different trees!”

  “My mother heard him last night, down along the bayou, between our cornfield and the swimming hole! I know she heard him!”

  “How do you know?” Circus asked.

  Dragonfly gave him a set-jaw look. “’Cause my mother has insomnia. She was awake most of the night and heard everything that could be heard. That’s why.”

  “Your mother has what?” Poetry cut in to ask.

  And Dragonfly, maybe thinking he ought to be proud of his mother for having something none of the other gang members’ mothers had, said, “Insomnia! I–N–S–O–M–N–I–A,” spelling the word to let us know he knew how to.

  “Well,” Poetry said teasingly “maybe that’s why she heard it. Anybody with I–N–S–O–M–N–I–A could imagine anything.”

  That seemed to set Dragonfly’s temper on fire and started him toward Poetry with both fists flying—which maybe Dragonfly ought not to be blamed for. Any boy wouldn’t want any other boy to say anything against his mother, even if the other boy was only teasing.

  For a few fast-flying seconds it looked as if there might be a big fight. Dragonfly was like a little wildcat. He let his bony-knuckled fists go wham-wham-wham-whop-sock-sock-sock on Poetry’s round sides and stomach and several other places.

  The fight had been going on only a few minutes when Big Jim came running up the path that borders the bayou. Seeing and hearing what was going on, he stopped the brawl by grabbing both boys by their collars and yanking them apart. “What is going on here?” he demanded.

  “He called my mother a bad name!” Dragonfly sniffled, trying to break loose to give Poetry’s unprotected jaw another sock.

  Big Jim kept on holding them apart and told them firmly, “If you really want to fight, we’ll set a date, get you some boxing gloves, and follow the Marquis of Queensberry rules.”

  Dragonfly came out with a question then. “What’s the queen’s berries got to do with it?”

  Poetry, still being in a mischievous mood and being a reader of more books than the rest of us, returned a saucy answer to his stubborn little opponent: “A long time ago, John Sholto Douglas, a marquis in Queensbury, England, helped a boxer named Arthur Chambers write twelve special rules for boxing. They changed it from bare knuckles to gloves, and all fights had to be in three-minute rounds. Does that satisfy you? If it doesn’t—”

  Poetry was just getting a good start letting Dragonfly and maybe the rest of us know what he’d read lately in some encyclopedia, when Big Jim broke in to demand again, “What’s this fight really about?”

  Little Jim started to explain but got interrupted by several of the rest of us and then by Big Jim’s orders. The rest of us finally kept our voices out of it, and then Little Jim told why Dragonfly and Poetry were scuffling.

  And do you know what? Big Jim acted as if he thought Dragonfly might have a point.

  “If,” he said soberly, “Alexander is alive, and if he runs and plays at night along the bayou and up in the hills or in the path that goes through the swamp, Dragonfly’s mother could have heard him. Let’s all be friends again—you two especially—and let’s go on up to the cemetery to have a look around. I heard a dog howling last night myself, and it sounded like it was near the mouth of the cave or maybe out in the swamp.”

  Well, when you don’t believe something, but a very special friend of yours all of a sudden does believe it, it’s kind of hard not to change your mind and believe it yourself. I looked at Big Jim’s set jaw and liked him a lot.

  “You sure you’re not just saying that so Dragonfly won’t feel like a dumb bunny?” I managed to whisper to him so that nobody else could hear.

  Big Jim lowered his eyebrows at me and gestured toward Dragonfly with his eyes and with a smallish jerk of his head.

  Knowing Circus’s father had three hounds, which sometimes made a lot of dog noise at night, I turned to Circus and asked, “Did one of your hounds get out of the kennel last night and go hunting on his own maybe?”

  “Not even Silent Sal,” Circus answered with a shake of his head.

  I knew if Silent Sal, one of their best varmint trailers, had treed an animal anywhere, most anybody in the neighborhood would have heard her. She was what is called a “silent trailer,” which means that when she is following the trail, she never lets out a bark or bawl or squall or howl. But when her nose has snuffled the coon or possum or skunk or whatever it is all the way to its hiding place, then she really turns loose.

  Big Jim still had his eyes on me, and his stern face told me he didn’t exactly like my doubting him, if I did, which I really didn’t. I was just doubting myself.

  “All right,” he said firmly, “let’s go on up to Alexander’s grave and see if he’s still buried there.”

  “I’ll bet there’ll be just a hole in the ground where we buried him,” Dragonfly offered.

  I quick looked at Little Jim’s serious face to see if he was beginning to be scared. He didn’t seem to be, though he was gripping his cane with both hands as though he was ready to use it on anything he had to, if he had to.

  Before any of the rest of us could say anything further, Big Jim was off and running and calling back over his shoulder, “Come on, everybody! On the double! Follow me!”

  Quick as six barefoot flashes, all of us—on the double and triple and quadruple and also sextuple, because there were six of us—were running pell-mell in the direction of the sycamore tree, the cave, and the swamp.

  It’s one of the most wonderful experiences a boy can ever have—feeling the soft green, sometimes sun-browned, bluegrass carpet under his bare feet as he races plop-plop-ploppety-sizzle through the woods, with his best friends running beside, behind, or in front of him, dodging briars, stooping to miss overhanging branches, being careful not to let any low branch that you have pushed aside fly back and hit the friend behind you in the face—all of you racing helter-skelter toward some kind of adventure, new and exciting and maybe even dangerous.

  What would we find when we finally reached the haunted house, crept around it to the cemetery, and peeked over the weed-grown fence at the overhanging elderberry bush, under which just one month ago we had buried the most important dog hero in Sugar Creek history?

  5

  In almost no time, it seemed, we reached the rail fence at the west end of the woods. We leaped over or crawled under or wiggled between the rails, whichever different ones of us decided in a hurry to do, lickety-sizzled ourselves across the gravel road, up the small incline on the other side, through or over or under another rail fence, and went zip-zip-zipping on, following the ridge above the creek until we came to the steep path leading down to the branch, almost where it empties into Sugar Creek.

  Right away the gang was on the other side of the slow water of the branch—all except me, that is. Because my mother had ordered me to be especially careful of my new denim jeans, I decided to go a little farther upstream and cross on the narrow log bridge there. Being especially careful but also having my eyes on Little Jim, who had leaped across a narrow place and was already clambering up the bank ahead of me, I slipped on a slippery spot on the log, lost my balance, and landed in about two feet of the wettes
t water that ever a boy’s new blue jeans landed in.

  As wet in different places as a drowned rat, I sort of waded up the slippery slope on the other side and hurried slippety-slosh after the gang along the footpath that leads to the sycamore tree, the mouth of the cave, and the mysterious trail into and through the swamp.

  In maybe eight minutes, we came to the place where the path divided—the right fork leading to the sycamore tree and the cave and the left toward Poetry’s place. There we stopped to catch our breath.

  There also we got stopped, because Poetry panted to all of us, “Who’s in a hurry to go to a cemetery! That’s the last place on earth anybody goes to anyway”—using a very old worn-out joke most people trying to be funny had stopped using years ago. “Let’s go see old Whitey and her family. She’s the most popular sow in the county now, getting her picture in the paper and mostly because she’s a mother hog, you know,” he finished, strutting a little and shaking his head proudly as if he and not old Whitey was the most important news in the Hoosier Graphic.

  To humor our round friend, we took the left fork and went toward the sycamore tree in their barnyard, which is as old as the other same-sized sycamore at the mouth of the cave. They’d have made a pair of giant tree twins if they had happened to grow side by side.

  I could tell we were getting close to Whitey and her litter when Dragonfly began to get a mussed-up expression on his face. He stopped and took a jerky deep breath with his face tilted toward the sky, as if he was fighting a sneeze. I could feel my own face going into a tailspin, too. But that was because of my wet clothes and the breeze that was blowing across the barnyard against me.

  In another several seconds we were getting close to the tree, and my nose and my ears both were telling me we were about to see an old white mother hog with her six little pigs.

  When we got there, Poetry spoke first, saying, “There, Dragonfly, my dear, is your howling dog. A famous mother hog and her family of new pigs. Listen to them squeal! They sound just like a howling dog, wouldn’t you say?”