“In the frogs’ meeting, one big shaggy-browed father frog stood up and bellowed: ‘Fellow members of this convention, the Bay Tree Inn Dining Room has listed on its menu at a charge of ten dollars per dinner, chicken-fried Sugar Creek frogs legs. I have just learned that two of the boys of the Sugar Creek Gang have read that menu and have decided to go into business as the Sugar Creek Frogs Legs Supply Company. The Bay Tree Inn management has offered them fifty cents for every pair of frogs legs they bring in—a paltry sum, for legs as large as ours.’”
I stopped in my speech—it was a little hard to be my father and a bullfrog at the same time. But it did feel good to have my parents listening without interrupting, so I quickly went on, hurrying a little to get in what was on the frog speaker’s mind. “‘One of the boys of the gang, the first and worst son of Theodore Collins, wants to earn enough money to pay for his parents’ vacation, and it is up to the citizens of Frogs Legs Island to stop him. If the boys do organize their company, they’ll row their boat over here every night, shine their flashlights all around, blinding us, and fill their gunnysacks with us, and we’ll all be chicken fried.’
“The big, handsome bullfrog father finished his speech, let out a scared croak, and sank like a submarine into the shallow water. The maybe one hundred other frogs at the convention went ker-plunk under at the same time, because maybe Leslie Thompson or William Jasper Collins had thrown a rock over toward the island and scared them all half to death.”
Right away I turned myself into the judge. I swung back from the picture window I had been looking out of and asked, “Lady and gentleman of the jury, have you reached a verdict?”
The gentleman of the jury, who was also the foreman, answered, “We have, Your Honor. We find the defendant guilty!”
Quicker than a frog’s croak, my father became the judge, sentencing me with lowered eyebrows and stern words. “You, first and worst son, are hereby sentenced to membership on the governing board of the Sugar Creek Frogs Legs Supply Company. When do you begin operations?”
From behind me, a boy’s voice broke in to say, “Tonight, sir.” It was the friendly, ducklike voice of Leslie Poetry Thompson, who had come in while the frog was making his speech and who maybe had been listening to the whole thing.
Mom broke up the meeting then, saying, “We’d better hurry on home. The mail will be there in—” she interrupted herself to look at her wristwatch, then finished her sentence “—in another thirty minutes.”
“What’s the rush?” the judge and gentleman of the jury asked. “I thought maybe you’d like to run on into town and shop around for that vacation lounging robe you’ve been looking in the catalogs for.”
The lady of the jury gave the gentleman of the jury a smallish frown and said, “Oh, you!”
Then Mom added, “I’m sorry, but I won’t be able to take any vacation this year. Not while my boss is on his own vacation.”
“Your boss? Is that what I am to you?” Dad asked.
It seemed a good time for Poetry and me to go outside and discuss plans for our first trip to Frogs Legs Island that very night.
I knew what Mom meant about her “boss” being on vacation. Old Man Paddler had finished the last chapter of the book he had been writing, and my mother was typing it for him. The old man wasn’t on a vacation exactly. He was in California visiting his nephew, who was on his vacation and wanted his uncle to come out and go fishing with him in the Pacific Ocean for codfish off the coast of Santa Cruz and for mackerel off the barge near Santa Ana.
Mom had been working every day during her spare time to get the book finished before the old man would get back. He had been gone for more than a week.
Being secretary for Old Man Paddler meant also that she had to look after his mail, which our mail carrier, Joe Sanders, left in Theodore Collins’s box every day instead of in the old man’s box up in the hills.
Nearly every day there had been a letter, and sometimes quite a few, from people who had read the old man’s first book, The Possible Man in the Impossible Boy, and wanted him to explain something or other. And sometimes there would be a letter from somebody with a heavy heart who wanted him to pray for him or her.
Nearly every day, also, there would be a letter from missionaries, thanking him for praying for them and for helping pay their missionary expenses.
Being a private secretary, Mom was supposed to open all the mail to see if there was anything important enough to have to be forwarded to California.
One thing, especially, Mom was supposed to watch for—any news from Palm Tree Island about Kenneth Paddler. Soon after the Sugar Creek Gang found him, he had disappeared again, and the missionaries didn’t know where he was. He had written one letter to his brother, Seneth, saying he hoped to come back to Sugar Creek as soon as he felt able to. But then, just as many years before when he had had amnesia, he’d just disappeared.
Anyway, while Mom and Dad were still talking inside the Cliff Cottage living room, Poetry and I took a walk across the narrow footbridge toward the other side of the ravine. We stopped about halfway across to look down at the very happy little branch, threading its way around among the rocks.
“Your big bullfrog father was right,” Poetry remarked, leaning over the railing and focusing his eyes on the rocks the saucy little stream was tumbling around and over and through. “Anybody falling over the edge would really get hurt and—”
He stopped himself, exclaiming, “Listen!”
I didn’t have to listen to hear what I was hearing, which was the sound of a motor way back in the woods somewhere. It sounded a little like an electric saw cutting down a tree or cutting a tree into fireplace wood.
We looked out into the dense woods and saw two motorcycles driving like crazy toward us along the path that bordered the branch. At the farther end of the bridge we were in the middle of, the riders slowed down, skidded to a stop, and looked across to where we were. It seemed that they weren’t seeing us, though, but were looking past us to the large living room window of Cliff Cottage where Mom and Dad maybe still were.
They stopped only a few minutes, talking to each other, then both motors roared to life and took off back into the dense woods and up a steep hill. They dodged this way and that to miss trees and bushes and fallen logs, going in the direction of Harm Groenwold’s apple orchard, which we knew was on the other side. Then they disappeared.
“Did you see what I saw?” Poetry asked.
What we had both seen was a name in large letters printed on the back of each of their red leather jackets. It was SONS OF LUCIFER.
“Maybe that is the name of their motorcycle club,” Poetry guessed.
But those two motorcycles racing through the woods didn’t seem very important right that minute while Poetry and I were planning our first big business venture.
How was I to know that that very night, while we would be on Frogs Legs Island, the Sons of Lucifer would explode us into a very dangerous adventure?
2
By the time my parents came out of Cliff Cottage to drive us home, Poetry and I had built up our hopes so high that we had saved almost a hundred dollars from the two hundred pairs of frogs legs we were going to harvest and sell to the manager of the Bay Tree Inn Dining Room. That would be fifty dollars apiece. We could have a lot of fun doing it, too, having had quite a lot of experience catching bullfrogs at night when all the gang was there. But, of course, this time there would be only the two of us.
So we planned, but we got our plans upset when we stopped at Dragonfly’s house to pick up Charlotte Ann. The minute we pulled up to the mailbox under the silver maple tree at their place, Dragonfly came running like the wind toward us. He was carrying a copy of The Sugar Creek Times.
“Look!” he exclaimed. Then his face took on a mussed-up expression. He let out a sneeze and explained with a grin, “I might be allergic to the ink on this paper.”
Right away his thoughts came back to where they had been, and he thrust the paper tow
ard us, showing us a page he had marked with red pencil. It was an advertisement by the Bay Tree Inn Dining Room and—of all things!—it included the menu Poetry and I had already seen, which had given us the idea of making a hundred dollars selling frogs legs that summer.
I hadn’t seen Dragonfly so excited in a long time. “L–l–last night when we came home from visiting Uncle Quentin at Colfax, we stopped on the bridge so Mother could watch the lightning bugs above the island. Th–th–th–there was m–m–m–maybe a million bullfrogs whooping it up all up and down the creek. I’ll bet we could sell all we could catch!”
Dragonfly’s mother, with Charlotte Ann toddling along beside her, came out the Gilberts’ front door then. My small sister was carrying a new blonde-haired doll in the crook of her arm. “Come on in a minute,” Mrs. Gilbert called to my mother. “See what came in the mail this morning!”
And while the judge of the court and Old Man Paddler’s secretary went into the Gilberts’ house to see a new fur-collared coat Dragonfly’s mother had ordered from a catalog, the only three members of the Sugar Creek Gang that were left organized the Thompson, Gilbert, and Collins Frogs Legs Supply Company.
Standing in the shade of the silver maple beside their mailbox, we made a three-cornered circle and agreed to divide our profits equally and to stand by each other “through thick and thin, for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, until death do us part.”
It was Dragonfly’s idea to use part of a wedding ceremony for what he called our “Pledge of Allegiance.” Even though it wasn’t anything new, it would have to do until we could think up something especially good for a frogs legs supply company.
Pretty soon the jury came back out, having decided Mrs. Gilbert’s new fur-collared coat was not guilty of having anything wrong with it. Old Man Paddler’s secretary, being a human being, came mincing across the yard toward Thompson, Gilbert, and Collins, wearing the new coat, as if she was a model in a women’s style show.
And just then Dragonfly sneezed. He said to Poetry and me, “Mother might have to send it back. I might be allergic to the stimulated mink collar.” And he sneezed again.
Poetry whispered to him, “The word is simulated, not stimulated.”
Dragonfly got a stubborn expression on his face and answered Poetry, “The word is stimulated. Dad says it’s stimulated mink.”
Seeing the Gilberts’ mailbox, Mom decided we’d better hurry on home to get our own mail, so pretty soon we were spinning down the gravel road toward our place.
The minute we were in the driveway and had stopped, Mom was out of the car and taking a quick look in the box that said “Theodore Collins” on it.
It was empty.
“How come!” she complained to her husband.
“The Gilberts already had their mail. It shouldn’t take this long for Joe to get from there to here!”
“Don’t you remember?” Dad reminded her. “They’ve changed the route a little. He drives down the lane between our south pasture and Groenwolds, delivers Harm’s mail, circles back past the schoolhouse and Rogerses, then Thompsons, and finally stops here. We’re one of the last stops on the route now.”
Dad himself took a peek into the empty box, scratched his head, and remarked, “He should have been here by now, though.”
We got special permission from the judge and his wife to make a fast trip down to the boat at the mouth of the branch. We wanted to make sure it was empty of water and that the oars were in their hiding place nearby, so that, as soon as it was dark enough, we could make our first trip to Frogs Legs Island, which the frog speechmaker had named the place.
Poetry and I swung onto our bikes and away we went rickety-whirlety-sizzle down the gravel road, stirring up a cloud of dust that sailed toward the woods in the direction of the leaning linden tree and the spring.
At the north road, we stopped in the shade of the big sugar tree, as we nearly always did to see if there were any new sale bills tacked on it, which there would be if anybody in the county was having a farm sale.
I was ready to take off, being in a hurry to get to the boat, when Poetry stopped me.
“Wait—I want to show you something!”
He stood his bike against the trunk of the big tree and waddled over to the rail fence, ordering me to follow him, which I did. A few feet from the fence, he slowed down and, shushing me, crept slowly toward what looked like a big new spiderweb. “Watch!” he ordered, and I watched impatiently as he stooped, picked up a firefly he found half buried in the grass, and threw it into the spider’s web.
Quicker than the firefly could have given a fleeting flash, a big brown spider came driving out of his hiding place straight for the firefly. He seized it and—well, I turned away, always feeling sorry for anything that got caught in a spiderweb.
Maybe it was because Circus, one of the members of our gang, had almost lost his father once when he had been bitten by a black widow spider.
“Let’s go,” I said to Poetry.
He answered, “Yeah, let’s! I could at least have fed the spider a centipede. I’m sorry!” Which proved my almost best friend did have a tender heart, and that is one reason he is my almost best friend.
In only a few minutes, our bikes reached the hill that leads down to the branch bridge, and there, not more than fifty feet from where the row of lilacs starts, was the red-white-and-blue mail truck and Joe Sanders sitting beside it in the shade of an elm tree.
“Flat tire,” Joe said to us when we braked to a stop. “I had one flat this morning when I was still in town. I left it for repair at the station, and now I’ve got another. Maybe on a day when I’ve planned a fishing trip right after dinner, I ought be double sure I have a spare with me.”
“I used your phone,” he said to Poetry, “and the station is sending a man out as soon as they can. But it’s going to make delivery late for the rest of the people on this route.”
“You have any mail for the Collinses and Old Man Paddler?” I asked.
Joe looked at his watch, then up the road to see if maybe his spare tire was coming. He said, “Not much for the Collinses but several letters and a package for Mr. Paddler. Oh, yes, there was a card for you—two, in fact.”
He handed me two postcards, one from Seneth Paddler in California and addressed to William J. Collins, Secretary, The Sugar Creek Gang. The other was from Circus and Big Jim down in Tippecanoe County.
We read the card from Old Man Paddler first. It was written in his very careful, trembling longhand and said:
I am going to be away a little longer than I planned, so you boys can run up to the cabin Saturday to see how things are. The lawn will need mowing again. Yesterday I caught seventeen mackerel while fishing from the barge just off the coast from Santa Ana. Next winter, maybe, I’ll fly you boys out for a few days just to see what saltwater fishing is like—and you can take in Disneyland while you’re here.
My heart leaped with a glad feeling—even greater, it seemed, than when we had first found out we were going to get to vacation on Palm Tree Island.
“Good news?” Joe Sanders asked, but I was already reading the card from Circus and Big Jim, part of which was:
We might not get to stay the full two weeks. There’s a new law, we found out, that won’t let a farmer hire a boy under sixteen to work for him, even if it is his own uncle. And if the boy does work, he can’t get paid for it. So look for us home one of these days or nights.
The upper half of the card was in Big Jim’s handwriting, and the lower half was from Circus, who wrote in green ink:
We’ve been having a lot of fun with Big Jim’s new tape recorder. Yesterday I sneaked up on a ruffed grouse while he was making his drumming noise. It sounded like a rubber ball bouncing a mile a minute on a tin roof. When we get back, we can tape our voices and all the different sounds in the swamp and along the creek.
Poetry asked Joe Sanders then, “Was there any mail for Leslie Thompson?”
“There was,” Joe s
aid. “I handed it to your mother when I made the call for the spare tire. It was your science magazine. It has an article on fireflies. Science has discovered what it is that makes them light up and—” Joe Sanders stopped, grinned, and explained, “I had a few minutes to spare, so I leafed through it—after I delivered it to your mother, of course.”
Everybody on Route 4 liked Joe Sanders so much that we might not even care if he opened our first-class mail—which, of course, he wouldn’t, because it would be against the law.
One of the letters for Old Man Paddler, as well as the package, was from an address on Palm Tree Island, I noticed. Would the letter—and maybe even the box—be from the old man’s twin brother?
When I saw the foreign postmark, the idea hit me that if Joe would let me, I could take them home in a hurry just as soon as Poetry and I could make a flying run to the creek to see if the boat and the oars were there. That way Mom wouldn’t have to wait for him to get his tire fixed.
It seemed like a good idea, but it wasn’t.
“Sorry,” Joe said, “but there’s a law that won’t let me give mail for somebody else to anyone under eighteen years of age. Are you eighteen or more?” he finished with a chuckle.
I wasn’t and hadn’t been for a long time.
“But I’m going right straight home,” I objected, not liking to have my idea squelched.
Joe looked at Poetry and me and, in a serious voice, said, “These are days when too many people are keeping only the laws they happen to like. But laws, boys, are for obeying. Suppose, for instance, that I let you have your parents’ mail and Mr. Paddler’s. And suppose there was something of great importance in the letter and maybe in the box—something worth thousands of dollars. Just supposing, of course. And if for any reason you should lose it, you wouldn’t like to visit me in jail, would you?”
Poetry cut into the conversation then and was smart enough to say, “We couldn’t look through the bars at a nicer mail carrier.”
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 25-30 Page 19
