Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 25-30 Read online

  As we rambled along, the sound of the dying chicken kept repeating itself every few seconds, which made it easy to keep going in the right direction.

  We’d been huffing and puffing along for maybe ten minutes when Circus pulled up short, stopping Silent Sal, and said, “Wait, everybody!”

  We stopped and waited, and he said, “How come that old hen doesn’t stop squawking? You’d think she’d be dead by now! That’s the tenth time she’s done it—starting like she was being killed by something or other, then stopping, and starting again the same way!”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “First, she gets killed by something, then she comes to life again, and keeps on dying and coming to life. Hens can’t do that!”

  Dragonfly didn’t help any when he came out with “A ghost hen could!”

  We were getting close to the squawking now. At Big Jim’s shushing orders, we all stopped talking and walking and stayed standing in our tracks. We kept ourselves in the shadow of the spreading maple tree we were under. The moonlight dappled our faces and clothes as it filtered through the branches.

  “Sounds like maybe she’s caught in a trap or something. Maybe in the wire fence between the swamp and Old Man Paddler’s woods,” I suggested.

  Big Jim came back with “But how did somebody’s old hen get this far from home all by herself?”

  Dragonfly’s answer didn’t make any more sense than a lot of his other ideas did. But believing what he did, it must have made sense to him. “She could have fallen out of the flying saucer that’s been skimming around the sky every night. And maybe she landed in the thorn tree beside the stile.”

  While we were standing there in a half-crouch as if we were afraid something or somebody would see us, Poetry came up with what seemed a good idea. “Let’s keep our flashlights off, so if there is a little green man from Mars or from some other planet, I can get a color picture of him. Our lights might scare him, and he’d go flying back to wherever he came from.”

  Again we started toward where we thought we should go, creeping cautiously along from the shadow of one tree to another till we came even closer to where the start-and-stop dying hen was. We were crouched now under the umbrella-like branches of a papaw tree. One of its foot-long leaves drooped in front of my eyes, making it hard to see what I couldn’t see anyway.

  Beside me, I could hear Dragonfly trying to stop a sneeze as he whispered to me, “I’m allergic to chicken feathers.”

  Circus, who’d overheard him, disagreed. “You’re too far away for that. It’s the overripe smell of these papaws you smell.”

  Maybe it was. Papaws got ripe this time of year, looking like short, very fat bananas. The extraripe ones were like custard on the inside and had a sickening taste. I might even be allergic to them myself, because just looking at one a barefoot boy has stepped on, and smelling it at the same time, always gives me a headache.

  It was too dark to see if any of us had stepped on a ripe papaw, but somebody must have. I began to be sick at my stomach, very, very sick. Like a cowboy on a bucking bronco exploding out of a chute at a rodeo, I went storming out of our hiding place under the tree into the moonlight on the opposite side of the tree, and for a few minutes sounded like a dying hen myself—or maybe like a young Rhode Island Red rooster learning to crow.

  As soon as I had finished swallowing backward, I felt better and was able to come back into our nervous little circle, where Silent Sal wasn’t so silent. She had a muffled growling in her throat, as though any minute she would make a dive toward something she was seeing and start barking.

  “You know what it sounds like?” Big Jim now asked and didn’t wait for anybody to answer. “She’s not caught in the fence. She’s up somewhere. Up in a tree, maybe.”

  One thing for sure, my ears now told me, the squawking was coming from some up direction.

  “Listen, you guys,” Poetry said. “If I’m going to get a picture of whatever it is, I’d better do it before it flies away.”

  That seemed the best thing to do right now. So with Poetry leading the way, his camera poised, we began inching ourselves along after him like five snails in a race with each other to see who could crawl the slowest.

  As we followed the shadow of the shrubbery that bordered the fence, Circus was especially careful not to let Silent Sal make a howling dog of herself. If that old black-and-tan hound should let loose one of her own wailing howls, whatever was up a tree, or telephone pole, or was hanging suspended from a flying saucer would go zooming off into the sky. Then we’d never get a picture of it—or her or him or them.

  Any minute now, we’d be near enough. Poetry would focus his camera, press the button, there’d be a blinding flash of light, and we’d have our proof that there really was a flying saucer or something, if there was.

  “Shh!”

  It was Big Jim shushing us, but not a one of us needed to be shushed. We were hearing a kind of scary new sound now, coming from the left, a sound like some animal creeping along—not toward the fence but toward us! There was the now-and-then snapping of a twig being stepped on or a pile of leaves being stumbled into. Then there would be silence for maybe ten or more nervous seconds. There wasn’t a thing we could see, yet we kept on hearing footsteps. Whatever was coming was keeping in the shadows the way we were.

  And then cold and nervous chills began racing up and down my spine, for suddenly I was not only hearing a cautious movement but was also seeing something as large as that middle-sized bear in the Goldilocks story.

  Whatever it was, it was trying not to be seen.

  Now it was standing on two legs, sort of stooped over. No, it was down on four legs, crouching and crawling at the same time. To get from one shadowed place to another, it had to move across a few feet of moonlit space, and that’s when I caught a glimpse of something bright reflected in the moonlight.

  It seemed time was standing as still as we were—all of us except Poetry, who was still ahead of us, looking like a middle-sized bear himself. The very second he snapped his picture, we would all turn on our different flashlights and get to see what was what and why.

  And then, all of a sudden, the whole place exploded into action. There was a quick movement ahead of us. The shadow of something the size of a small gorilla leaped out from behind the black bole of a tree, and a powerful blinding light swooshed on. It lit up the shrubbery we were hiding behind, our faces, and all of us—even Poetry himself on his hands and knees about ten feet ahead of us.

  A split second later, after the on-and-off flash, four blinding lights came on, as though a monster’s four five-inch-wide eyes all in a row were focused on us.

  Dragonfly let out a scream. “It’s little green men from Mars. They’re trying to blind us!” He stumbled back, bumped into me, lost his balance and fell, while the rest of us held our hands before our faces to keep from being blinded.

  At the same time, the dying hen stopped squawking, and there came megaphoning through the woods and along the bayou and the swamp the long howling squall of a lonely hound.

  Pandemonium broke out then. Silent Sal fought herself loose from Circus. She lit out in the direction of the fence and, in a series of wild bawlings and howls and short sharp barks, began leaping wildly around the base of an elm tree that grew there only a few feet from the stile.

  11

  What can you do at a time like that, when there isn’t a thing in the world or out of it you can think of to do, and you can’t think anyway?

  The four bright lights were still on us. Dragonfly was still on the ground, shielding his eyes with his arm. The sounds of the howling dog and the squawking hen were still coming from somewhere up in the elm tree, around the base of which Silent Sal was noisily leaping up and howling, “Treed!”

  Then, as abruptly as the four eyes had been turned on us, they went off, and I heard a worried voice calling, “What is it, Romaine? Are you all right?”

  My blurred vision showed me, coming across a stretch of moonlit grass between the hed
gerow and the beginning of Old Man Paddler’s place, a tallish man limping along. With him, on the end of a leash, was a nervous, excited dog, straining and pulling and almost dragging the man after him.

  Dragonfly, seeing what I was seeing, let out an explosive “It’s Alexander! He’s alive!”

  The tall, bareheaded man was wearing a red plaid robe, and I noticed that one leg from the knee down to the ankle was snow-white and almost twice as big around as a man’s ordinary leg ought to be.

  Poetry seemed to have his mind on something else. He had shoved the long beam of his powerful flashlight up into the elm, where we’d been hearing the sound of the squawking chicken. A second later he exploded, “Look at your dying old hen, will you! It’s not an old hen! It’s a loudspeaker!”

  I looked and saw a bell-shaped something or other, the size of an old-fashioned record player’s speaker. Silent Sal was silent now, sniffing lazily around the base of the tree, where an aluminum ladder was lying. Then she came kind of sheepishly back to Circus and to our excited little circle. Her sad, wrinkled face drooped as if she was ashamed for barking up a tree when that tree was as bare of any varmint as Mother Hubbard’s cupboard had been when she had gone to it “to get her poor dog a bone.”

  The nervous, excited, copper-colored dog was still straining at his leash, trying to get Silent Sal interested in acting the way a dog ought to act when it meets a dog stranger. But Sal, now that she had been fooled by something that was nothing, yawned, stretched, and lay down at Circus’s feet. She looked up at him with sad eyes as if to say, “I refuse to be fooled again. That copper-colored dog is not a dog. I’ve just been dreaming.”

  It seemed maybe she had been, and maybe we all were, because if there was ever in the world a dog that looked and acted like Alexander the Coppersmith, it was the mongrel that now came up to our circle, wiggling all over the place, sniffling at everything and everybody.

  There’d been a little excited talk between the man and the girl he had called Romaine. Some of it was beginning to make a few things clear to me and to help put the pieces of a crazy, mixed-up picture puzzle into place.

  Answering the tall man’s question, “What is it, Romaine? Are you all right?” the girl had called back to him in a worried tone of voice, “Father! You shouldn’t be up! Of course, I’m all right! Only I’ve taken a movie of something I wasn’t looking for—the nice boys I saw in the swamp yesterday. Remember? One of them killed the water moccasin for me.”

  I wasn’t sure right then that I was a “nice” boy. I was disgruntled at having my ideas about a flying saucer exploded. And one question was whirling around in my thoughts: Was the copper-colored dog wiggling all around us a real dog, or was I still back under the spreading branches of the beechnut tree beside the Black Widow Stump, sound asleep with an unsound mind?

  Right then something else began to happen. There was the sound of a car motor, and from the direction of Old Man Paddler’s cabin came a pair of headlights, bouncing along in the lane that was used by forest rangers when they patrolled the woods. A red light on top of the car was flashing on and off, and a spotlight searched the area all around until it came to focus on us. The car stopped about fifty feet from where we were, and a voice called through a loudspeaker, “This is the police! Have you seen anything of a lost boy?”

  Then another voice came from the police car—a woman’s voice—calling, “Roy Gilbert! What on earth are you doing out here in this ghostly woods?” It was Dragonfly’s mother.

  It was Dragonfly’s father too, we found out in a few minutes, when a tall, grayish-brown haired man wearing a green shirt and gray flannel trousers came hurrying with Mrs. Gilbert right out into the middle of all our other excitement.

  I didn’t exactly like to see what I had to see right then, which was Dragonfly’s worrisome mother make a running dive for her son. She threw her arms around him and cried and said, “What on earth made you leave your room? You’ve had us worried half to death!”

  I felt sorry for Dragonfly, having his mother cry all over him with everybody looking on, as though he was just a little kid and not a good-sized boy able to take care of himself.

  Next day, back at our place, when I was telling my parents about our exciting night and how embarrassing it must have been for Dragonfly, Dad disagreed with me. He said, “A son hasn’t any business causing his parents a lot of needless worry. He shouldn’t have climbed out that motel window and gone chasing off with Circus and Big Jim like that.”

  I was still on Dragonfly’s side, so I answered Dad, saying, “But he almost had to, believing what he did. If he’d asked his parents first, they wouldn’t have let him go—and just think what he’d have missed out on!”

  Mom put in her own idea then. “I can understand the boy, having a normal son of my own. But let’s not blame his parents for worrying, especially his mother. She almost had to cry over finding him, believing what she did—that her son was maybe kidnapped. A son is worth more than a million dollars to a parent.”

  I took a quick look at my parents, and it seemed maybe they were trying to tell me something. Maybe they liked their own first and worst son more than anything in the world, unless maybe it was their first and worst daughter, who right that minute was out by the toolshed, over halfway up Dad’s ladder, which he had left standing there after having been up on the roof trying to fix a small leak.

  My mother made a swooshing dash for the ladder and got there just in time to catch her daughter, who was almost all the way to the top. The ladder was losing its balance, and in another second or two somebody would have fallen down and cracked her crown.

  When Mom turned back to us, carrying her unhappy daughter, she sent several sharp arrows at Dad with her eyes and said, “Somebody’s first and worst husband is not supposed to leave a ladder standing.”

  That sent my mind back to last night. I thought of the elm tree beside the stile, the loudspeaker hidden in the branches of the tree, and, at the base of the tree, Old Man Paddler’s long aluminum ladder.

  “That’s what happened to the girl’s father,” I told my folks—having learned it last night. “Last week he set a ladder up against the tree and climbed up to attach a loudspeaker up there. He was on his way down when the ladder slipped, and he fell and broke his leg, which is how come he was wearing a walking cast.”

  I explained several other things to my folks, while Charlotte Ann whimpered and squirmed, wanting to go back to the ladder and climb up all the way to the top to prove she was a big girl and could take care of herself.

  Dad went to the ladder and, with a sort of set face, hung it where it belonged when not in use—on ladder hooks on the garage wall. There was an expression on his face that seemed to say he was a grown-up person himself and didn’t exactly enjoy having somebody’s first and worst wife telling him what to do and why and also when.

  As soon as he had the ladder in place and Charlotte Ann was pumping water into her drinking cup and throwing it over the iron kettle into the butterflies’ drinking puddle, he came back to Mom and me. Bowing low like an old-fashioned knight in a schoolbook, he took Mom’s hand, kissed it on the back, and said, “At your service always, madam!”

  The next week was maybe one of the most important of our lives. The gang not only got the mystery of the howling dog cleared up, but the man—we found out he was a lecturer on wildlife—actually hired us to help him and his daughter Romaine get a lot of movie and still pictures of animal life in our territory. We also helped him get tape recordings of as many wildlife voices as we could—crickets plick-plocking, tree frogs trilling, bullfrogs thundering. There were enough flash camera shots at night to make any boy’s superstitious mother think she was seeing flying saucers above the swamp.

  Getting pictures at night had been the most interesting when we helped the professor set up his “camera trap,” as he called it. First, we would hide his loudspeaker in a tree or along the creek or near a beaver dam. Then, when he was ready, he’d turn on his tape rec
order, and all kinds of animal distress calls would go echoing through the woods and along the bayou. And almost every time, if we waited long enough, some animal would get caught in the act of being himself.

  Their copper-colored dog, we found out, was named Napoleon Bonaparte. He was so much like Alexander the Coppersmith that he really could have been him, if we all hadn’t known he wasn’t.

  It was after the man had broken his leg and had to stay around camp that he and his daughter Romaine had hit upon the plan to use a recording of Napoleon’s howls as a signal for her to hurry back to camp when her professor father needed her for something. She would use her whistle to answer him.

  Near the end of the week, after we’d helped him get about all the pictures and sounds of wildlife he wanted in our territory, he and Romaine were getting ready to break camp and move to northern Indiana to get other pictures and sounds in the sand dunes there. One of the most interesting chapters in our lives was about to end.

  Tomorrow was their last day, and we were feeling pretty sad. We were lying in the grass near the Black Widow Stump, talking and trying to make up our minds whether to go in swimming or just laze around awhile, then mosey on up to the professor’s camp.

  Just then the professor himself came limping along the path that borders the bayou. Running ahead of him in all directions was his dog that looked and acted like Alexander the Coppersmith. The man was carrying binoculars on a leather strap around his neck, and every now and then he would stop and write something in a notebook. He would use his binoculars to scan the sky and the trees all around. Then he would write again.

  Just that minute Napoleon Bonaparte scared up a cottontail that went scooting toward a brush pile not far from the leaning linden tree, and the professor quick whipped up his camera and took a moving picture of it.

  It was while his camera was sweeping the area that it picked up six boys lying in the shade of the beechnut tree, and he came over to have a little visit with us.