Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 1-6 Read online

  I went into the kitchen but not a step farther.

  “Well, Bill Collins!” Dad said, surprised. “Aren’t you glad?”

  The fact is, I wasn’t. I didn’t like girls very well, I’ll have to admit.

  But I guess Dad understands boys, for he didn’t make me go in. He just went in himself, and pretty soon I could hear him talking with Mom about me and also making funny cooing noises to the baby.

  “He wanted a little brother,” Dad said.

  Mom answered something I couldn’t hear, and then I heard some other woman talking too.

  Just to be sure I wasn’t missing anything, I peeped around the corner of the door and saw that the other woman had on a nurse’s uniform.

  I decided to go outdoors.

  Dad had planted some early potatoes in a special garden down along the orchard next to the road, and they were already up and growing. So I went to the toolhouse and got the hoe and started hoeing potatoes without being told to.

  I stayed mad all morning and wouldn’t go into the house at all. Dad just let me work and work, without saying much of anything to me. He was plowing in the field behind the orchard, and I noticed he was whistling and singing. Every half hour, or even less, he’d tie up the horses at the fence and go to the house. To see the new baby, I was sure. It looked as if I wasn’t going to be so important around our home anymore.

  About eleven o’clock I began to feel worse and worse. Two or three times I even got mad at myself because tears came into my eyes. I felt so sorry for myself. But then I began to get hungry, and I decided maybe I’d just go in at noon and eat dinner anyway. That is, if they’d have a plate set for me.

  Just when I was feeling the worst, Dragonfly came along, stopped on the other side of the fence, and said, “Hello, Bill!”

  “Hello,” I said, without looking up. My hoe slipped, and I cut off one of the biggest potatoes in the garden. But I didn’t care. I just took the hoe and chopped the potato to pieces and covered it up and went on hoeing, after wiping the sweat off my forehead.

  “What’s the matter?” Dragonfly asked. “What are you so mad about?”

  “Nothing,” I said, “except I’ve got a new baby sister!” I kept on hoeing.

  Dragonfly looked kind of glum and didn’t say a word for a minute. Then he asked, “How old is she?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “I’ll bet she’s ugly,” he said. “Girls always are when they’re little.”

  Now, do you know, I didn’t like to hear Dragonfly say that. In fact I resented it. “She’s pretty,” I said, forgetting that I hadn’t even looked at her. “She’s got pretty blue eyes and black curls!”

  “Yeah, but she’s a girl, though.”

  I was still disgusted and said, “Yeah, that’s the trouble.”

  “But as soon as she’s big enough, maybe you won’t have to help with the dishes anymore,” he said.

  That was the first encouraging thing I’d thought of all morning, so I kind of sighed.

  Since there was a peach tree right close by with a lot of nice shade under it, Dragonfly and I lay down in the grass and talked a long time about different things, mostly about last night and Old Man Paddler. Dragonfly was surprised at what had happened, and he felt bad to think he hadn’t been there to help us catch the robber. We kept on talking until Dad called me to dinner.

  Then Dragonfly got up and hurried home, suddenly remembering his mom had told him not to come over to my house this morning.

  It seemed funny for Dad to call me to dinner when all my life I’d been used to having Mom do it, but then I supposed she had to take care of the new baby.

  At the table Dad prayed a little longer than usual. He was so happy on account of that baby. Mom wasn’t feeling very well, so she didn’t come to the table. Besides, she had to look after the baby. The nurse carried a tray in to her and then came back and sat in Mom’s place.

  It didn’t seem right to have another woman sitting there, and I got to thinking maybe right after dinner I’d better go in the other room and see Mom anyway. If the baby was there, I’d just sort of look at it kind of quick without particularly noticing it.

  Well, pretty soon dinner was over, and I went over to the corner of the dining room where I always kept my straw hat. Neither Dad nor the nurse paid any attention to me, at least so I could notice. I kept looking at the door to the other room out of the corner of my eye, wanting to go in and pretending to be having trouble with one of the buckles on my overalls suspender.

  Then, hardly knowing I was going to, I sidled into the bedroom.

  And there was Mom in bed with the happiest smile on her face. Beside her, snuggled close and lying in the crook of her arm was the baby.

  I guess I never did feel so bashful in my life. I stood there, holding my straw hat in both hands, looking down at my bare feet.

  “Come here a minute,” Mom said.

  I walked over close to the bed and started looking at some roses in a vase on a table. They were about the color of the goldenrod writing paper we used in school, only the petals were soft like velvet. Dad had sent clear to Australia to get the seed, and he’d grown them himself out in our garden.

  Say, those yellow roses had the sweetest perfume! Their color made me think of the bed of wild fawn lilies I’d seen down along the creek only yesterday. I guess the real name for fawn lilies is “dogtooth violet,” only Dad says they aren’t violets. There were some blue and purple violets right close by that bed of fawn lilies, though.

  Pretty soon I said to Mom, “Do you think she’d like a bouquet of flowers from down along the creek? Maybe I’ll have time to go pick some for her.”

  “I’m sure she would,” Mom said, and her face was happier than ever. Honest, I’d never seen her so happy, and I could tell by the way she looked at me that she didn’t like my little sister a bit better than she did me.

  In about a minute I was out of doors, climbing over the fence, and running like a deer through the woods, following the little footpath to the spring. I was going to pick the biggest bouquet of flowers anybody ever saw for little Charlotte Ann.

  I was stooping down right in the middle of that bed of fawn lilies when I heard somebody coming.

  It was Circus. “Hello, Bill!” he said. “What you doin’?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “I got a new baby sister.” And I went on picking flowers, suddenly remembering that Circus didn’t like girls very well.

  “I thought you wanted a little brother!” he grunted, as if he was disgusted with me for not getting what I wanted.

  “She’s awful nice,” I said. “Black hair and blue eyes and—”

  “I’ve got three sisters,” Circus said, “and they’ve all got blue eyes. There ain’t anything special about blue eyes.” Just then he saw a good climbing tree, and in two seconds he was halfway up to the first limb.

  It made me plumb disgusted the way he talked. Whatever makes him not like girls, anyway? I thought.

  Pretty soon the whole gang was there except Big Jim, who had to do some work before he could come.

  “Bill’s got a baby sister!” Circus called down to the gang from where he was sitting, looking like a chimpanzee there on the first limb of the tree.

  “Yeah, and she’s got blue eyes and long black curls,” Dragonfly said, teasing me.

  “He’s picking flowers for her,” Poetry said.

  They all knew how I’d wanted a little brother. Even Poetry is teasing me, I thought.

  I just kept on picking flowers, getting madder every minute and liking my little sister better than ever.

  “I’ll help you,” Little Jim said. “I’ll bet she’ll like these.” He started to pick some harebells over by the beech tree where all of us boys had carved our initials. It was the kind of tree you could do that on.

  Little Jim always did stick up for a fellow when he was getting teased. And in a minute Poetry acted as if he was ashamed for having said anything, so he lay down in the grass an
d started picking flowers himself, reciting,

  “Buttercups and daisies,

  Oh, the pretty flowers;

  Coming ere the springtime,

  To tell of sunny hours;

  While the trees are leafless,

  While the fields are bare …”

  Only the trees weren’t leafless, and the fields weren’t bare.

  I finished my bouquet and ran home with it as fast as I could. Little Jim went with me, because he wanted to see the baby too.

  “What’s her name?” he asked, panting for breath.

  “Charlotte Ann.”

  “It’s a pretty name,” he said. “I wish I had a little sister.” And right then I decided I liked Little Jim an awful lot, almost as well as Poetry.

  When we got back to the gang, Big Jim was there. We all lay around in the grass talking about what had happened last night and explaining to Dragonfly and Little Jim that we couldn’t help it that they weren’t there to get in on the fun. We all kept looking at Big Jim’s sore knuckles and kind of envied him for being able to hit the robber so hard it almost knocked him unconscious.

  Then we decided to go look at the sycamore tree and the big hole in the ground. After that, Big Jim said, we’d hike up into the hills to see the cabin where Old Man Paddler used to live.

  Pretty soon we were all standing around the hole by the big swamp rosebush and being glad the robber was safe in jail where he couldn’t hurt anybody. The grass was mashed down where we’d had our fight.

  Little Jim just walked around with a sober face. He seemed to be thinking. Then all of a sudden he said, “I’ll bet if I’d been here and had got hold of one of his legs, I wouldn’t have let go!”

  “He only had two legs,” Dragonfly said, “and Bill and Circus had both of them.”

  Little Jim looked disappointed for a moment, then his face lit up. “But I could have helped sit on him after you got him down, couldn’t I?”

  Of course he could, I thought, but Dragonfly spoiled it by saying, “Not with Poetry sitting on him too. There wouldn’t have been room enough!”

  We all lay down in the grass then, and Poetry and I told the whole story all over again, not forgetting to tell how ridiculous Poetry had looked in his big, flapping pajamas and with the long hair and whiskers on.

  After that, Big Jim called a meeting and gave us a little talk about crime never paying. He quoted a kind of scary verse from the Bible that says, “Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, this he will also reap.” Then he explained that if anybody lived a sinful life, he’d have to suffer for it sometime, not only in this life but in the life after this one. And he made us promise we’d never—any of us—ever steal anything as long as we lived.

  When he got through, Little Jim piped up. “One of the Ten Commandments says, ‘You shall not steal.’”

  When the meeting was over, and we were on our way up into the hills, climbing toward Old Man Paddler’s cabin, I felt as if we’d all been to church.

  I kept thinking as we walked along about that beautiful sunset I’d seen night before last. The sun had been shining through long, pinkish clouds, looking like a waterfall tumbling over a dam with colored electric lights behind it. And I remembered how, pretty soon, those clouds had changed so that they looked like the bars of a jail.

  One cloud had looked like an old man with long whiskers. I kept thinking about Old Man Paddler and wondering what he was doing up in heaven—if he was there. And he was if he was dead, because Little Jim said that if people let Jesus into their hearts while they are alive, He’d let them into heaven when they died. Of course, my folks had taught me that too, a long time ago, but Little Jim’s saying it reminded me it was true.

  We had a lot of fun climbing up to the old cabin. We pretended that Big Jim was the sheriff and the rest of us were his posse and we were going up to ambush a band of robbers who lived there.

  In about a half hour, I reckon, we were close enough to the cabin to see it. So we all stopped and lay down in the grass and made plans as to how we’d capture those imaginary robbers.

  It made me feel creepy to remember that some people believed the old house was haunted. We knew that was because Old Man Paddler had just disappeared without anybody knowing what had become of him. Everybody finally decided he’d either drowned in the creek or else wandered too far off the path out into the dangerous part of the swamp and had sunk into the quicksand.

  Well, we made our plans and sneaked around from tree to tree and from bush to bush until we were real close to the cabin.

  All of a sudden Dragonfly said, “Psst!” and we knew he’d either heard or seen something.

  We all stopped dead in our tracks and listened, and I guess my red hair must have stood right up on end. I think we all heard it at once—a sort of low moan, as if somebody was trying to call for help and couldn’t because his mouth was covered with a blanket or something.

  11

  I closed my teeth together tight to keep them from chattering, because I didn’t want anybody to know how scared I was.

  I noticed Big Jim look around quick to see if Little Jim was there and all right. It was grand the way he looked after that little fellow. He couldn’t have liked him any better if they’d been brothers, I thought. And I made up my mind that even if Charlotte Ann wasn’t a boy, I was going to like her just as much as Big Jim liked Little Jim, and I’d protect her and take care of her too. Thinking that made me so I wasn’t nearly as afraid as I had been just a half a minute before.

  I could see Big Jim was making up his mind to do something, for we could still hear that muffled voice in the cabin, maybe calling for help. I kept thinking, What if whoever is in there is just trying to get us to come in so he can catch us in a trap! But we couldn’t afford to lie there waiting if somebody was really needing us.

  So pretty soon Big Jim told us to keep still while he and Circus went to investigate.

  In just about a minute we saw Circus standing in the doorway of the old cabin and motioning for us to come quick. I tell you, it didn’t take us long to scramble to our feet and get there.

  What do you think we saw the minute we got in? It looked as if there were only two rooms in the cabin, and on a cot in the corner of the first one was an old man with long white hair and whiskers and his hands and feet tied with strips of blanket. Big Jim was just taking a gag out of his mouth, which somebody had put there to keep him from calling for help, I suppose. He looked exactly like the picture I’d seen of Old Man Paddler, the picture Barry Boyland had given my dad in the hospital yesterday morning. He also looked like the robber we’d caught last night before his wig and beard had come off.

  “Water!” the old man cried in a broken voice.

  I thought of the map we’d found and of the picture of an old man in bed, asking a nurse for more water.

  Dragonfly looked around quick and found an old tin can on a table. Then he and I ran out and down the hill to where we’d seen a spring on our way up.

  “I wonder who he is,” Dragonfly said, panting for breath.

  “Old Man Paddler, of course,” I said.

  “But how can he be? He’s dead!”

  “He doesn’t look like it, does he?”

  “He’s supposed to be, anyway,” Dragonfly said.

  In about two minutes we were back with the water, and the old man drank as if he hadn’t had any for a long time. We were careful not to let him drink too much or too fast, because it might not be good for him.

  Pretty soon he was sitting up in bed and thanking us boys for coming to his rescue. He’d been tied up here since yesterday, he said, and he hadn’t had a drink since last night. He had the kindest little gray eyes, and you could tell by the way he looked at us that he liked boys. And that’s how we decided he must be the real Old Man Paddler.

  “You aren’t a ghost, are you?” Little Jim asked. You could see he liked the old man an awful lot. Little Jim always did like old people and was kind to them.
r />   That old man just laughed right out loud when Little Jim said that. He told us he’d left the hills about ten years ago and had traveled around the world, visiting many countries. He said he had decided to come back home and live the rest of his life here in the hills….

  But suddenly he stopped telling us about himself and looked around as if he were afraid. And that gave us the idea we ought to tell him about the robber being caught and his nephew getting shot and how his treasure was locked up in the big vault in the bank uptown right this minute—if it was really his treasure. So we told him, all of us helping a little bit.

  You should have seen the worried look leave his face. All of a sudden he said, “I bet you boys are hungry.”

  We weren’t. That is, we’d rather have heard his side of the story first—how he happened to get tied up and anything else he wanted to tell us.

  “I’ll bet you’re hungry,” Circus said.

  We began looking around to see if there was anything to eat.

  That robber we’d caught must have been living in Old Man Paddler’s cabin for quite a while. He had laid in a supply of food—canned pork and beans and corn and all kinds of fruits. And Old Man Paddler himself had brought some when he’d come home yesterday afternoon.

  We carried in wood and built a fire in the old stove and carried in a kettle of water for him.

  “I dug some sassafras roots yesterday on the way home,” he said, looking in a can on an old shelf. “How’d you boys like to have some tea? It’s very good for boys.”

  Sassafras tea, you know, is made from the sweet-smelling roots of the sassafras tree. The roots are a reddish color, and you cut them in little chunks and boil them in water till the water turns red. With sugar in it, it beats any other kind of tea all to pieces for taste. Anyway, I think so. Little Jim had never tasted any before, and he said it was just like drinking lollipop juice.