Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 1-6 Page 4

  The meeting wasn’t exactly the kind to appeal to red-blooded boys like us. But we liked the music and the minister’s prayer, which wasn’t too long, and his sermon, which was easy to understand and wasn’t too long either.

  Then they had what they call testimonies, and different people stood up and said nice things about Jesus and how they loved Him and how their prayers were answered—things like that. I just sat kind of trembly on the inside because I loved Jesus too, maybe as much as any of them did. And I was wishing the minister would say, “Now if any of the boys and girls would like to say a word, we’ll ask all the older people to keep still for a few minutes.” But he didn’t.

  So I just sat there wishing I dared get up anyway, but I didn’t, half promising myself I’d do it next Thursday night even if they didn’t ask for boys and girls to. Hadn’t Jesus died for boys and girls as well as for grown-ups? Even if I didn’t know very much about it, I knew I loved Him anyway.

  Poetry didn’t get up either, he being bashful on account of his voice being squawky, although I reckon that wouldn’t really have made any difference to the Lord if Poetry really loved Him.

  Pretty soon, while the minister was talking again, Poetry and I almost jumped out of our seats when he said, “This afternoon I was called to the hospital to see a man who is supposed to be a bank robber. He was just a young man too.

  Poor boy! He was all broken up about it, said he hadn’t done anything wrong and was out there in the swamp looking for something.”

  Poetry’s hand was gripping my arm so tight I could hardly keep from saying, “Ouch.”

  Then our minister asked us to pray for the man that he might be saved, because he wasn’t sure the boy would ever get well—and even if he did get well, he ought to be saved anyway.

  Poetry and I didn’t pray out loud like some of the rest of them did, including my dad, but we prayed quietly anyway, even if our eyes were wide open. There wasn’t anybody in the world that could pray better than my dad could, not even a minister. He prayed especially for that boy in the hospital. Then he prayed for all the boys in our neighborhood and for all the boys in the world, who, he said, would all grow up to be either good men or bad men, according to whether they became Christians when they were boys.

  I guess Poetry must have felt like I did, because I saw him put his hand up to his eye quicklike and brush away something. I was thinking, What if that boy had been one of the Sugar Creek Gang, or even Poetry or me? Of course, he was eighteen years old, and I was only ten and Poetry about eleven or maybe almost twelve.

  Well, the next morning my dad drove away in our car and was gone for about an hour and a half. When he came home, I saw him take his big black Bible out of the car and carry it into the house and lay it on the table. He said he’d been to the hospital to see Barry Boyland, which was the name of the robber—if he was one.

  Dad was kind of happy too. “He’s better,” Dad said, “and the doctor thinks he’ll get well in maybe a week or two.”

  “What else?” Mom asked.

  “Even if he doesn’t get well, it’ll be all right,” Dad told her, “because he took Christ into his heart this morning, and he’s saved now.”

  Mom seemed awful glad to hear that. She liked boys and wanted them all to be saved. “And he wasn’t a bank robber at all?” she asked.

  “They don’t know yet. He says he wasn’t. Says he lived out in California, that his parents were dead, that he used to have an uncle that lived around here somewhere, and he had come to look him up. I asked him why he had been carrying a gun, and he said somebody told him there were bears up in the hills and he was afraid not to. And that when he saw the sheriff and his posse, he was so scared his gun accidentally discharged. They thought he was shooting at them, and because he had black hair like the robber was supposed to have had, they shot back at him.

  “Just to prove he was really telling the truth,” Dad went on, “he showed me a picture of his uncle, which he had with him, and I’ve brought it home for you to see.”

  Dad took out of his pocket a picture about the size of a postcard.

  Mom gasped the way she did when she was terribly surprised and said, “Old Man Paddler! Why—why—”

  “Let me see!” I said, getting there as quickly as I could.

  “It’s nothing,” Dad said, not wanting to get me excited, I guess. “It’s just the picture of an old man who used to live up in the hills but who disappeared about ten years ago when you were a little baby.”

  He handed the picture to me, and it was my turn to be surprised. In fact, I never was so surprised in my life before. The picture looked exactly like Poetry did when he had on the wig and long whiskers.

  “What’s the matter?” Dad asked.

  “Nothing,” I said. Then I added, “Did he really die ten years ago?”

  “He must have,” Dad said, “although nobody seems to know what became of him. That’s his old cabin up in the hills—you’ve seen it—and people say it’s haunted, maybe because nobody knows what happened to the old man. Anyway, I told Barry Boyland his uncle was dead, and he seemed very much disappointed.”

  You can guess that I, Bill Collins, was listening for all I was worth to what Dad was saying, and thinking and thinking and trying to figure things out. The way Dad described the robber, he was the same one we’d seen yesterday, feeling around in the old hollow tree. I kept thinking about the wig and the whiskers and the dark glasses that Poetry’d found and the funny map with the picture of the old man in bed. I thought maybe Barry’s uncle was a crazy old hermit. Maybe he even drew the map himself, and maybe he hid it there in the old tree, and hid the disguise there too.

  But why? I asked myself.

  Anyway, maybe we boys would find out that afternoon. Now that we knew there wasn’t anything particular to be afraid of, it would be like some new game, only a whole lot more mysterious.

  Soon it was dinnertime, and right after that it was one o’clock. The gang was all down at the spring: Circus, Dragonfly, Poetry, Little Jim with his gunnysack, Big Jim with his tape measure, and me, Bill Collins.

  First, I told them what Dad had said about the robber not being a robber at all and about him being saved. You should have heard Little Jim sigh with relief, just as if he’d been carrying something heavy for a long time and somebody had suddenly lifted it off his shoulders.

  Even Circus seemed glad. There happened to be an elm sapling right there. He shinnied up it like a squirrel and stood on the first limb and slapped his hands against his legs like a rooster flapping his wings after he’s just won a fight with another rooster. And then Circus crowed in a way that sounded exactly like our old red rooster at home.

  We called a meeting and decided we’d start looking for the treasure, or whatever it was, right away. If we found it, we could help pay the hospital bill for Barry Boyland. You see, if he didn’t have any parents, maybe he wouldn’t have enough money to pay it himself. And if he was a robber—well, then, maybe we’d find the stolen money and get a reward. So pretty soon we were all there at the old tree again, measuring off twenty yards this time, which is the same as sixty feet, you know.

  It looked like sixty feet was going to be right under the biggest wild rosebush of all, the one with the sharpest thorns. We measured all over again to be sure. As near as we could figure, going straight east, that was just where it was. And that meant that whatever was buried there, if anything, must have been buried before the rosebush started to grow a long time ago.

  We just walked round and round, all of us being barefoot. We couldn’t decide what to do.

  And then Little Jim laid his gunnysack down right under the bush, laid himself down on top of it, and started raking away the leaves and dead grass with his stick. We knew he’d found something when we could hear the stick scraping on something hard.

  Big Jim got excited then, and in a jiffy he was down there too, digging away with the woodsman’s hatchet he’d brought along.

  We were all pretty
disappointed at what they found—nothing but a flat rock about a foot wide, all overgrown with moss and half buried in the earth. We stood there, looking at it and feeling spooky, for you could see as plain as day that it wasn’t any ordinary rock. The fact is, it looked a little bit like an old-fashioned tombstone, like the kind we have in our church graveyard, only it was lying down, instead of standing up.

  Big Jim was digging around it and was just about ready to pry it out and turn it over to see what was under it—or else what was written on the other side—when Dragonfly said, “Psst! Somebody’s watching us! I saw him right over there in the bushes!”

  I tell you, it didn’t take Big Jim long to cover that stone with dead leaves and dried grass, or for all of us to start acting natural. Poetry was the first one to get started, having maybe a hundred poems tucked away in his mind somewhere. He dropped flat on the ground—anyway as flat as he could—and made a mournful face and with his hand up to his head said:

  “Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,

  Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.

  All the king’s horses and all the king’s men

  Couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again.”

  Circus was already lying on his back, swinging his feet up and down, and saying, “One, two. One, two. One, two. Up, down. Up, down. Whoa!”

  Big Jim crawled out from under the rosebush, rubbed his eyes, and scolded us for waking him up. He talked so loud and looked so fierce that for a minute we thought he meant it. Then he yawned and acted awful sleepy.

  “Look, fellows!” I cried, holding up one of the roses I’d just picked, “Look at these pretty yellow stamens all around the green and white center! Why, this rose has only five petals!” I said surprisedlike. A stamen, you know, is the part of a flower that carries the pollen—if flowers didn’t have them, you could plant a million seeds and none of them would grow.

  But none of the boys were paying any attention to me, so I started looking for birds with my binoculars. In a moment I was looking at a big red-winged blackbird swinging in the top of a little tree along the creek, his scarlet shoulders shining in the sun.

  I swung the binoculars around as though looking for more birds, and then I saw somebody, sure enough, right over in the bushes. And would you believe it! He was an old man with long white hair and whiskers, only he didn’t have dark glasses on. Yes sir, he looked exactly like the picture I had seen of Old Man Paddler less than two hours ago.

  I lowered my binoculars quick and looked around to see if Poetry was still with us, and he was.

  Well, that meant we’d have to stop looking for the treasure now and wait till we were sure nobody was watching us. In fact, Big Jim said we’d better all go in swimming and come back later.

  We were just starting to leave when the man came out from where he was hiding and began hobbling toward us, looking awful meanlike. You could tell he was angry about something, for he waved his stick and shouted, “Get out of here! Don’t you know this property belongs to me, you little rascals? Get out, I say! Run! Or I’ll have the law on you!”

  “It’s Old Man Paddler!” I cried and started to run.

  In a flash the whole gang was running helter-skelter through the woods, just as fast as we could go, and we didn’t stop until we got to the spring. There we all dropped down on the grass and rested a minute so as to catch our breath and get cooled off before drinking. That’s what you’re supposed to do when you’re hot, no matter how thirsty you are.

  “Did you ever see a man so mad in your life?” Dragonfly asked.

  “I never did,” Circus said, filling one of the paper cups.

  Of course, we’d all heard about Old Man Paddler living up in the hills a long time ago. We’d been up to his empty cabin two or three times. But he was supposed to be dead now. Everybody said so. Yet we’d seen him with our own eyes this afternoon, hadn’t we? How can a man be dead and still be alive?

  “Maybe we saw his ghost,” Circus said. “My dad says this old swamp is haunted, but I never believed it before.”

  “There aren’t any such things as ghosts,” Little Jim said quickly, “’cause my mother says the Bible says that when a man’s dead, he’s dead for good, and that if he doesn’t go to heaven, then he goes to that … that other place, and nobody ever comes back again.”

  Somehow I knew Little Jim was right, but I decided to ask Dad about it when I got home that night.

  Anyway Big Jim still had the map. He said it probably belonged to the old man and we’d have to give it back to him. Maybe he had something buried there, and, after being away for ten years or more, he’d come back to get it.

  We decided not to go back today but to keep the secret about the old man because we didn’t want our folks to worry about us.

  When I got home I had the grandest surprise waiting for me, and you’d never guess what it was.

  “Let’s hurry and get your chores done, Bill,” Dad said. “You’ve been such a good boy that you may stay all night at the Thompsons, and you and Poetry can sleep out in their backyard in his tent.”

  Well, that was something I’d been wanting to do ever since school was out and Poetry had put up his tent! You can guess I didn’t waste much time helping Dad with the chores, even if ordinarily I am kind of lazy about it.

  9

  Sleeping in that big canvas tent with Poetry was the most fun I’d had in a long time. It was what is called a “wall tent,” about eight feet high in the center and four feet high at the side walls, and with a drop screen in front to keep out mosquitoes. Only there weren’t many mosquitoes in our neighborhood because we boys, and my dad especially, had poured oil on the surface of all the ponds and puddles in the swamp. And also we were careful not to leave any water standing around in tin cans or kettles or things, because that’s where mosquitoes breed.

  You know, mosquitoes are funny things. The kind we have in our neighborhood are what Dad calls the Culex kind, which don’t carry any disease such as malaria or yellow fever. Dad knows the scientific names for the kinds that do carry diseases, but they’re too hard for me to pronounce, and I can’t spell them anyway.

  As I said, mosquitoes are crazy things-crazy looking and crazy acting. Did you ever see those little wrigglers swimming around in your folks’ rain barrel or in a can of water?

  Those ugly little “wiggle tails,” as Little Jim calls them, are baby mosquitoes that have hatched out of eggs that their mothers laid in the water. Well, those little wrigglers keep growing and wriggling until they’re as big as they’ll ever get. And then all of a sudden they stop wriggling and float up to the surface of the water. They lie there just like they are dead until their skin bursts open all the way along the back and out crawls a full-grown mosquito. She flies away, all ready to stick her sharp nose into somebody—if she doesn’t get slapped good and hard first. Say, does a mosquito bite ever itch! But if you put some soda water on it real quick, it’ll feel a lot better right away.

  My dad drove me over to Poetry’s house and let me out at the front gate. “Be sure to be a good boy,” he said, which I didn’t like to hear because I’d heard it maybe a million times in my life already—a thousand times anyway. I guess maybe I needed it, though. Anyway, I wouldn’t like it if my dad wanted me to be bad, would you?

  So I called out cheerfully, “I will!” I was willing to promise most anything because Dad had been so good to let me stay all night with Poetry in his tent.

  I carried my little brown suitcase proudly up the walk and around the house to where Poetry’s tent was pitched under a big maple tree. Poetry was so glad to see me you would have thought he hadn’t seen me for a whole year. He lifted up the drop screen at the front of the tent, which was made of what is called “bobbinet” and had a wide band of cheesecloth all around it for a border so it wouldn’t tear so easy or wear out so quick.

  Pretty soon we were inside, and was it grand! There were two cots, one on each side with an aisle about three feet wide between them. In a corner, Poetry had
a nice little table with books and things on it—things such as a pocketknife, a compass, and his little black leather New Testament. Poetry was the kind of Christian who was brave and wasn’t ashamed to let anybody know what he believed, while at the same time he was an honest-to-goodness boy that everybody liked. Maybe he was a little more mischievous than some boys, but I felt proud to have him as my best friend.

  We decided to go outside.

  “I’m glad you brought your binoculars,” Poetry said, “’cause we might need them before morning.” He didn’t explain what he meant.

  However, we used them right away, looking around at different things. By standing up on Poetry’s chicken house I could look across the field and see the chimney of our house and the big green ivy vine that almost covered the whole south side. I could see the big window of my upstairs room, which I always kept open when I slept, even in winter. That was one of the reasons I had such good health.

  All at once, while Poetry and I were still standing on their chicken house talking and thinking and liking each other awful well, Poetry’s dad called out sharply from the barn, “Leslie Thompson! Get down off there right this minute! You’re too heavy for that roof! Don’t you know it might smash in and kill a half dozen of your mother’s finest laying hens?”

  “All right,” Poetry called back and started to obey. “I only weigh a hundred and forty pounds,” he said to me. “I guess my being so short makes me look like two hundred.”

  In a little while it was dark, so we told Poetry’s folks good night and went inside the tent. Poetry took a match out of a waterproof matchbox, the kind everybody ought to have when camping. He struck it, and in an instant there was plenty of light to see to undress by, coming from a little kerosene lamp on the table in the corner.

  We’d already washed our feet in an old foot tub just outside the tent door and had put on our slippers—Poetry’s mom making sure we did it, so we wouldn’t get her nice clean sheets all dirty.