And so little spindle-legged, crooked-nosed, straight-muscled Dragonfly was a hero, too.
With the pliers from the box, Big Jim snipped off the hook. He eased it out of Old Whopper’s mouth, and the biggest bass in Sugar Creek was free. The minute Old Whopper knew for sure he was free, he gave a disgusted flip of his tail, and took off for Davy Jones’s locker or somewhere, as much as to say, “I didn’t want those old fishing worms anyway! They’re catfish bait! They’re not fit for a fine fish like me!”
It had been a wonderful and a terrible day, not like any we had ever lived through in our whole lives.
The wind came to life then, harder than ever, and we knew that pretty soon, if seven boys didn’t beat it for shelter, we’d get rained on.
It didn’t seem to matter though. What was a little rainwater anyway?
In the climb to the Maple Leaf, Little Jim said to me secretly, “Every day’s a wonderful day.”
And it was.
Shorty was carrying the tackle box, and I heard him and Poetry talking as they puffed their chubby ways up the hill together.
I was surprised to hear Shorty say, “Aunt Elona is going to start a new club here in America. It’ll be called the Vida Eterna Fishermen’s Club, and I might become one of the charter members. As soon as any boy finds out in his heart what vida eterna means, he is already a member. And every new member is supposed to get another new member each year—or more, if he can.”
A kind of happy thought came breezing into my mind right then. Big John Fenwick didn’t have to live in a foreign country to be a missionary or a fisher of men. He had been fishing all summer, and he had caught a boy—a real whopper of a boy.
My thoughts were still a little mixed up, and I wasn’t quite sure I wanted Shorty to stop being my enemy, because all my life it seemed I had had at least one. But it did feel good to have a warm heart toward anybody who was such a changed boy as Shorty seemed to be right then.
My tangled-up thoughts got straightened out in a hurry, though, when Shorty began to sing in a warbling falsetto the song Elona had taught us at our fish fries around the barbecue campfire and which we had heard the big fisherman from Costa Rica singing quite a few times when he was out in the boat alone. It was the one that begins, “Yo tengo vida eterna en mi corazon.”
Shorty’s voice didn’t sound too bad. In fact, it sounded so good that Circus, the best singer of us all, stopped, looked back down the hill at Poetry and him huffing and puffing their way up, and called to Shorty, “With a voice like that I’ll bet you could yodel.”
I quickly looked at Circus, surprised at such a friendly tone of voice.
Then I had my attention blown away by a buzzing sound above my head, like a hummingbird darting around Mom’s petunias. Looking up, I saw not only one ruby-throated hummingbird buzzing around Elona’s feeder but three green-backed, white-stomached, dark-winged, red-throated hummers, buzzing and chasing each other all around like a gang of boys having a rough-and-tumble good time around and over each other in Sugar Creek.
The humming and buzzing were like the humming and buzzing of a darning needle dragonfly, skimming along above the muskrat swamp, gobbling up mosquitoes, and droning his dragonfly song, “Be kind. Be kind!”
Little Jim, beside me, was trying to sing falsetto. “Yo tengo vida eterna,” he began, then stopped and said, “You know what my new brother’s name is going to be?”
“No, what?” I asked.
And he answered with a grin. “Littlest Jim.”
It wasn’t a bad idea, I thought. And, when I studied his happy blue eyes looking up at me, I also thought, There are two kinds of pride, and Little Jim has the best kind there is.
There was a clap of thunder then, and when I took a look at the western sky, I saw old Long Neck Blue take off from the island and wing his way toward his favorite roosting place somewhere in the direction of the sycamore tree and the swamp.
From beside me, then, I heard Shorty Long’s voice saying, “Here, Chippy! Here, little brother! Here’s a peanut for you!”
I looked, and there was a neat little brown chipmunk the size and shape of Chippy-chip-chee, bashfully eyeing us from behind the barbecue pit, as though he wanted to be friends with anybody who had anything for him to eat.
There was a little glad feeling in my mind as I saw Shorty holding out his hand and saying, “Here’s a peanut for you. It’s a little wet, but it’ll taste good.”
And Chippy-chip-chee’s brother—or cousin or uncle or maybe his father—scooted out, grabbed the wet peanut out of Shorty’s hand, and away he went, a little brown streak of nature in a fur coat, happy to be living in a world where so many people were kind and nobody hated anybody.
The Sugar Creek Gang Series:
1 The Swamp Robber
2 The Killer Bear
3 The Winter Rescue
4 The Lost Campers
5 The Chicago Adventure
6 The Secret Hideout
7 The Mystery Cave
8 Palm Tree Manhunt
9 One Stormy Day
10 The Mystery Thief
11 Teacher Trouble
12 Screams in the Night
13 The Indian Cemetery
14 The Treasure Hunt
15 Thousand Dollar Fish
16 The Haunted House
17 Lost in the Blizzard
18 On the Mexican Border
19 The Green Tent Mystery
20 The Bull Fighter
21 The Timber Wolf
22 Western Adventure
23 The Killer Cat
24 The Colorado Kidnapping
25 The Ghost Dog
26 The White Boat Rescue
27 The Brown Box Mystery
28 The Watermelon Mystery
29 The Trapline Thief
30 The Blue Cow
31 Treehouse Mystery
32 The Cemetery Vandals
33 The Battle of the Bees
34 Locked in the Attic
35 Runaway Rescue
36 The Case of Missing Calf
Paul Hutchens
MOODY PUBLISHERS
CHICAGO
© 1970, 1998 by
PAULINE HUTCHENS WILSON
Revised Edition, 1998
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
All Scripture quotations are taken from the New American Standard Bible, © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, and 1994 by The Lockman Foundation, La Habra, Calif. Used by permission.
ISBN-10:0-8024-7031-9
ISBN-13: 978-0-8024-7031-7
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PREFACE
Hi—from a member of the Sugar Creek Gang!
It’s just that I don’t know which one I am. When I was good, I was Little Jim. When I did bad things—well, sometimes I was Bill Collins or even mischievous Poetry.
You see, I am the daughter of Paul Hutchens, and I spent many an hour listening to him read his manuscript as far as he had written it that particular day. I went along to the north woods of Minnesota, to Colorado, and to the various other places he would go to find something different for the Gang to do.
Now the years have passed—more than fifty, actually. My father is in heaven, but the Gang goes on. All thirty-six books are still in print and now are being updated for today’s readers with input from my five children, who also span the decades from the ’50s to the �
��70s.
The real Sugar Creek is in Indiana, and my father and his six brothers were the original Gang. But the idea of the books and their ministry were and are the Lord’s. It is He who keeps the Gang going.
PAULINE HUTCHENS WILSON
1
It might have been a long, hot, boring summer for the three members of the Sugar Creek Gang that were left—and there were only three of us left, Poetry, Dragonfly, and me—if all of a sudden one of the most interesting, exciting, and dangerous experiences hadn’t exploded like a Fourth of July firecracker right in front of our eyes.
That stormy, mysterious, dangerous, and upside-down experience came to life the first week after Big Jim, Circus, and Little Jim left Sugar Creek territory to be gone for two whole weeks. Big Jim and Circus were to work on Big Jim’s uncle’s farm in Tippecanoe County, and Little Jim would visit a cousin in Wisconsin.
The mystery started the week the new Bay Tree Inn Motor Court was finished and had what is called “open house.” Our family as well as maybe everybody else’s family in the neighborhood went to see it. Well, not all our family went—just Mom and Dad and me—because Charlotte Ann, my chubby little cute-nosed sister, had been left to be baby-sat at Dragonfly’s house.
There wasn’t anything Charlotte Ann would rather do, anyway, than be baby-sat by Dragonfly’s mother, who nearly always gave her a new toy. She also let her play house with a set of pink plastic dishes and do almost anything in the world she wanted to do that wasn’t dangerous.
I never will forget what my mother said to my father when the three of us were alone in Unit 17 at the Bay Tree Inn. That neat little cottage had been named Cliff Cottage and had been built by the management for people who wanted to stay quite a ways away from the sounds and sights of tourists in the sixteen other units. It sort of hung on the rim of a sandstone cliff overlooking a deep ravine, the same ravine, in fact, through which flows the small stream the gang calls “the branch.”
Except for Sugar Creek itself, we liked the branch better than any other stream in the county. You could follow its sometimes lazy, sometimes nervous and excited and noisy, way from its source all the way through Harm Groenwold’s woods and pasture, then into and through Thompsons’ woods to where it finally empties at the mouth of the branch, where most of the time the gang keeps its boat tied.
Poetry, who is always reading interesting things and thinking up different ideas to make people laugh, has said maybe a hundred times, “The branch can lie in bed all day and run all over the county at the same time.”
And Dragonfly, who also has a keen mind, nearly always answers him with: “It doesn’t just lie in bed, it runs in bed—and not just all day but all night and, like a certain friend of mine, it’s also all wet.”
Anyway, standing near the picture window of Cliff Cottage’s air-conditioned living room, Mom looked out and across the footbridge that spanned the ravine and said, “You couldn’t find anything more picturesque at Turkey Run State Park, or at The Shades, or even in Brown County.”
Brown County was the beautiful hill country Mom had been born and brought up in and where she had been a schoolteacher and a secretary before Dad had found her and married her to make her a farmer’s wife.
Dad was standing beside Mom with his left arm halfway around her. Looking out that same window, he remarked, “If anybody taking a walk out there on the overhanging porch, or across the footbridge, should accidentally lose his balance and topple over, he would land like a ton of bricks on the rocks below and break a lot of bones. It’s a good thing they have that iron railing all the way across.”
Mom’s answer was: “Not a ton but only one hundred forty-seven pounds. And not of bricks but of a hot, tired, and worn-out housewife who would like to spend a few days’ vacation here away from washing, ironing, cooking, looking after the chickens, answering the telephone, canning cherries, raspberries, corn, and beans, and keeping her patience with two noisy children.”
I was standing behind my parents near the fireplace at the time. I had just come in to ask an important question that Poetry Thompson, my almost best friend, who was just outside the door, wanted me to ask. It was a very important question—one of the most important questions I might ever ask.
Hearing Mom say she needed a vacation from her two noisy children, I accidentally on purpose cleared my throat.
She turned a startled face in my direction, grinned, and remarked, “My first and worst son excepted, of course.”
Being called their “first and worst” son by my parents was their way of saying I was the only son they had and that they liked me. So I grinned back at my first and worst mother and answered, “Your first and best son agrees with you. You do deserve a vacation, and I know a way I can help raise money to help your first and worst husband pay for it.”
That seemed a good way to get to do what my mind was all excited about getting permission to do—in fact, what Poetry and I already had our minds made up to do. And all that was needed was to get our parents to agree to it.
When for a minute neither my mother nor my father answered me, I managed to say, “Of course, if you wouldn’t want the money, I could save it for a very badly needed two-week vacation for myself, just as soon as Big Jim and Circus and Little Jim get back. In fact, you could take your vacation right here in Cliff Cottage while the gang is having a north woods camping trip, which we haven’t had for quite a few summers—if I can remember that far back.”
Dad answered my suggestion by reminding me that six boys he knew had had a winter vacation not so long ago. “You do remember when the gang flew to Palm Tree Island, don’t you?”
For a few seconds I let myself remember the gang’s wonderful trip to the West Indies. First, our plane had sailed high out over small islands called the Florida Keys. As we’d looked down at them, Poetry had said that they looked like the “disjointed vertebrae of the backbone of the skeleton of a giant, hundred-mile-long dinosaur.”
Then, after only a hundred or more or less minutes in the plane, we had landed at the Palacia airport. Palacia was the capital of Palm Tree Island. There we were welcomed by a missionary friend of Old Man Paddler’s and by hundreds of excited, friendly, Spanish-speaking people.
It was while we were on that vacation on Palm Tree Island that we found Seneth Paddler’s long-lost twin brother, Kenneth.
For another few seconds, while I was still standing by the fireplace in the Cliff Cottage living room, my mind’s eye saw Kenneth Paddler, long-bearded and looking exactly like his brother, riding down one of Palacia’s cobblestone streets in a small cart. He was driving a billy goat, an honest-to-goodness billy goat.
My father’s voice broke into my memories of the gang’s West Indies vacation as he leveled his gray green eyes at me. “Was there something special you wanted to say about how you could earn a little extra money this summer to help make it possible for your hardworking father, who never gets a vacation, to go with your mother when she goes on her vacation?”
What on earth! I thought. Imagine a boy’s father needing a vacation. “You mean you get tired of planting and plowing corn, feeding hogs, making speeches at Farm Bureau meetings, milking cows, and building fences? Or are you just tired of having to put up with a son you wouldn’t have to put up with if you would send him off to camp somewhere—maybe in the north woods?”
“Good try.” Dad grinned and added, “But I believe you were talking about your first and worst parents’ vacation.”
I came out then with what was on my mind, beginning with, “Do you like fried frogs legs?”
Mom whirled around from the picturesque view across the gully, looked at me with an exclamation point in her brown eyes, and asked, “What kind of question is that?”
Maybe I should have told you—for about a week at our house we had been having a lot of family fun pretending we were actors in a play, having listened to what is called a “mock trial” the week before at the Sugar Creek Literary Society.
Sometimes
I was a lawyer and Mom was the jury. My smallish sister, Charlotte Ann, was being tried for such crimes as spilling her milk, pulling up a petunia instead of a weed, or leaving the screen door open and letting our old black-and-white cat in. Things like that. Nearly always my father was the judge, and he would do what is called “pronounce sentence.”
So when my brown-eyed mother asked me there in the Cliff Cottage, “What kind of question is that?” I could feel my father’s gray green eyes boring into me from under his reddish brown brows, asking the same question.
“If it please the court,” I began, “I am not the criminal in this case. I am the defense attorney, and my client is an honest boy.”
For a minute I actually felt I was a lawyer, as Poetry’s father had been in the mock trial. I swaggered over to the picture window that overlooked the limestone cliff on the other side and said, “See that little thread of water away down there at the bottom of the gully? That friendly little stream laughs and dances like an innocent barefoot boy through Harm Groenwold’s woods and on through his pasture, through Thompsons’ woods, and finally empties into Sugar Creek at the place known as the mouth of the branch, sacrificing its happy, carefree life to the larger, well-known creek shown on the map as Sugar Creek. Now, Your Honor, it so happens that the boys of the Sugar Creek Gang keep their boat tied there—”
In my mind I was back at the mock trial. It felt good being able to think on my feet, better than it does sometimes when I am alone in the woods yelling out Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address to the trees and birds and frogs. I swung around then to my parents, who in my mind had just become the jury, and went on.
“Last night, while Leslie Thompson and his friend, William Jasper Collins, son of the famous Farm Bureau speaker, Theodore Collins, were sitting in their boat fishing for catfish, they noticed that over on the island among the willows and pickerel weeds maybe a hundred bullfrogs were having a Farm Bureau meeting, bellowing and croaking and having the time of their lives.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 25-30 Page 18
