The only thing wrong with a winter day when the sun shines down on you and the snow looks like a big white blanket spread all over the ground—and in some places the wind has made the snowdrifts look like big waves of white water—is that you keep wishing it wasn’t so cold so you could go swimming.
Big Jim and Circus walked on ahead, pulling the toboggan, doing what is called “breaking trail,” which means finding the best places to walk and walking there themselves so it would be easier for Little Jim and the rest of us to follow.
Dragonfly was just learning how to use snowshoes. Sometimes he would forget to lift the forward end of his foot before trying to take the next step, which is about the same as trying to step up on the curb when you’re in town without lifting your foot. If you don’t lift your foot first, ker-squash you go, headfirst in a snowdrift, which Dragonfly did maybe a dozen times until he started to remember to lift his foot first. The first time he fell in, we had to help him out because the drift was so deep. Sometimes you can’t get out at all without kicking your snowshoes off first.
We laughed at Dragonfly, and Poetry teased him by saying:
“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.”
Then, just about a minute later, Poetry forgot to lift his foot first, and swaddle-de-dump-ker-sizzle, down he went headfirst into a huge, very soft drift. There he was completely buried with his snowshoes kicking. And he couldn’t get up or out until we helped him.
Big Jim stopped and came back to where we were. With all of us helping, we dragged Poetry back by the legs to a place where the snow wasn’t so deep—Dragonfly said it was like dragging a hippopotamus.
Then, before Poetry could get up, Dragonfly—who was still disgusted with him for calling him Humpty Dumpty—pointed at him and yelled, “Look, gang! This is the cow with the crumpled horn, that tossed the dog, that worried the cat, that caught the rat, that ate the mat, that lay—”
Poetry rolled over quick and grabbed Dragonfly by the leg. Down Dragonfly went again.
Well, a wrestling match in a snowdrift, with snowshoes on, is fun to watch, so we watched until Big Jim stopped it and said we’d better go on.
It was a lot farther following the wagon trail than taking the shortcut through the swamp that we took in the summertime. But of course it was safer, and it’s silly for a boy to run any foolish risks just because he isn’t afraid to. Dad says that being brave isn’t half as important as having good sense.
It was half past two by Big Jim’s watch when we came to the spring where the old man got his water, which was about half a city block’s distance from the cabin.
“Look!” Dragonfly cried. “There aren’t any footprints or any path coming down to the spring.”
The snow was very deep there too. It had snowed hard last night, I thought, so maybe the old man hadn’t shoveled a path yet because he had enough water in the house to last him for the day.
“Here we go!” Big Jim shouted back to us. “Let’s shovel a big wide path for him!”
Then Dragonfly yelled again, “There isn’t any smoke coming out of his chimney either!”
Without knowing why, I began to feel very weird inside. I remembered what the kind old man had said one day last summer when we’d told him we hoped he’d live forever. He had laughed and said, “Live forever? That’s exactly what I’m going to do, only I’m going to move out of this dilapidated old house first.”
And we knew he didn’t mean his weathered old log house with its clapboard roof, which looked like a picture of the house Abraham Lincoln was born in. He meant a wrinkled, white-haired house with long white whiskers and gnarled old hands that trembled.
We hurried around to where we could see the front door. Poetry, who had run on ahead, let out an excited gasp and squawked, “Look, everybody! The door’s wide open, and the floor’s all covered with snow!”
Poetry was right. A big drift was right inside the door, and snow was all over.
For a minute not one of us said a word. I thought, What if he’s already dead? We stood looking at each other sad-like, as people do when they stand around in front of a church after a funeral, waiting for the pallbearers to come walking down the steps with the casket.
Then Big Jim said, “You boys wait a minute.”
My teeth were chattering, and it couldn’t have been because I was cold, because walking with snowshoes on will make you warm quicker than you can get warm standing around a fire, unless it’s terribly cold. It was getting colder, but I think my teeth must have been chattering because I was afraid the old man was dead.
Little Jim had a very sad expression on his face.
We watched Big Jim go up to the open door. He took off one of his heavy mittens and gave four sharp raps with his knuckles and waited, while I kept on holding my breath and feeling half scared and half excited. You know you ought never to walk into anybody else’s house or even into his room without knocking first. Mom says it’s a “law of etiquette” that has to be obeyed if you want to be polite.
Big Jim knocked again, listened, and didn’t hear anything. When he knocked the third time and nobody answered, he called, “Hello! Anybody home?”
Still there was no answer. So he called back to us, “There’s nobody here!”
We decided we’d better go in to see what was wrong, although there was already a sad picture in my mind of what we might find when we got inside. I could imagine the old man lying there on the cot with his clean white whiskers covering his whole chest, and maybe his eyes would be shut, and he would be dead. Or maybe he was already buried under the snow that had drifted in through the open door, there having been a very hard wind last night.
I put my arm around Little Jim so he wouldn’t shake so—and maybe so I wouldn’t shake so much either.
“I’m not s-scared. I’m just c-cold,” he said bravely.
I guess that was the first time I’d noticed how much colder it was up here in the hills than it had been at home. It felt almost twice as cold, although the sun was still shining and that helped some. There weren’t any clouds in the sky except maybe two or three big white ones that looked like a lot of cotton balls piled together.
Big Jim stepped out of his snowshoes and stood them up just outside the cabin door, scooped about eight inches of snow off the step, and started to go in. Then he stopped dead still and straightened up with a jerk and listened again.
I guess we’d all heard it at once, whatever it was. It sounded like the wind moaning in the trees, which it might have been, because the wind was beginning to blow a little. We all kept on listening, and we didn’t hear anything else, so pretty soon we were all inside the main room where the fireplace was.
But Old Man Paddler wasn’t there. The cot over in the corner where he slept was empty. There was a pile of wood but no fire. Poetry and Dragonfly hurried into the other room of the cabin to see if he was there, and he wasn’t.
That other room was like our woodshed at home. Along the walls were more stacks of wood—heavy logs for the fireplace and short, split wood for the cookstove.
Back in the main room, we all stood beside the big snowdrift, which we’d been walking on and which was mashed down with our tracks. We kept looking at each other and feeling foolish because we’d thought we heard somebody calling, and yet there wasn’t anybody here.
“I’m sure I heard somebody,” Poetry said, and Dragonfly said the same thing, and so did I.
“I guess it was the wind in the trees,” Big Jim decided, and most of us decided the same thing.
“Where do you suppose he w-went?” Little Jim wanted to know.
Poetry, having a detective mind, began to look around for a note.
Circus said, “Maybe he went to town to get his mail and hasn’t come back yet.”
“How’d the door get open?” Dragonfly wanted to know.
Everybody was talking, and nobody was listening to anybody, the way grown-up people do sometimes when there are a lot of them together.
I kept thinking, I’m sure I heard a voice!
Then suddenly I felt cold chills running all the way up my spine to my red hair, which tried to stand up under my cap but couldn’t. I jumped as though somebody had exploded a firecracker behind me, for as plain as day I heard it again, a kind of low moan. And it was right under where I was standing, which was all covered with snow.
11
You could have knocked us all over with a turkey feather! Big Jim whirled around as quick as a baseball player does when he tries to knock a home run and misses the ball. Little Jim’s face turned almost as white as the snow he was standing on. Circus looked up at one of the beams that went across from one side of the cabin to the other, as if he thought he’d heard something up there. Dragonfly’s eyes were nearly popping out of his head.
Poetry was the only one who seemed to be thinking straight. But he had a sort of detective mind. As quick as a hummingbird can flash from one flower to another, he was down on his knees, scooping away the snow. In a minute he had uncovered a steel ring that was fastened to the floor by a big staple!
We helped him scrape away a lot more snow and saw that somebody had cut a door in the floor, which meant that maybe there was a cellar down there. One side of the trapdoor was covered with pieces of wood—it looked like some of the woodpile had tumbled over and fallen on it. At first we’d thought the split logs were just lying there on purpose.
But how’d a cellar get there? We’d been to the cabin many times last summer, sometimes with Little Jim’s bear, and there hadn’t been any cellar then.
But I remembered that day about six months before, just as we were leaving, that the old man had stood up and said, “I must be getting on with my work now”. He hadn’t told us what his work was, and even though we had wanted to ask him, we hadn’t because we thought maybe it wasn’t any of our business.
All of a sudden Circus remembered something too. “Remember the big rug he always kept here?”
And we remembered. That’s why we’d never seen the trapdoor before.
Well, here it was—a door cut in the board floor with one hinge showing and the other covered up with a big pile of wood. On one side was the big metal ring, like that kind of door always has, so that you can lift it up when you want to.
Then we heard the moan again, and we knew that somewhere down there was somebody who needed help. When a gang of boys knows somebody needs help, it doesn’t take them long to start doing something. In less time than it takes to tell it, we had that pile of wood moved and leaning against a corner of the fireplace, and we were looking down into a big hole under the cabin that looked as black as a barrel of tar. There was a stairway going down, but we couldn’t see very well.
“Hello, down there!” Big Jim called, while Little Jim’s hand held on to mine so tight it almost hurt me.
Then somebody answered, with a sad groan. “He-hello!” It was Old Man Paddler’s quavery voice.
Knowing he was alive made me feel better. Little Jim sighed loudly, as if somebody had given him a breath of fresh air. I looked at him quick, and I don’t know what made me think of it, but I thought his face looked like the face of one of the lambs in my Bible story book. Jesus was carrying the lamb in His arms, and it wasn’t afraid.
Big Jim and Circus, being the oldest boys in our gang, went down into the cellar first, walking down a narrow wooden stairway. Then Big Jim called for me to come too.
It wasn’t much of a cellar, but it was a good place to keep things in the winter so they wouldn’t freeze. Right away I saw Old Man Paddler on the dirt floor, half lying down and half sitting up. He was shivering with the cold. And one of his feet was twisted and swollen as though it had been sprained or broken.
In my mind it was as plain as day what had happened. He had started down to get something. Then he’d slipped on the stair and fell and broke or sprained his ankle and couldn’t get back up right away. The wind was blowing hard last night. Maybe it had burst open the outer door of the cabin, which might not have been shut tight. Maybe the door bumped against the trapdoor, which was leaning open against the corner of the fireplace, and the trapdoor fell shut. Maybe all that jarred the high rick of wood along the wall, and it had fallen down on top of the trapdoor. So the old man couldn’t get out.
Later we found out that was exactly what had happened.
Well, we had to act fast because Old Man Paddler was suffering, and he was so cold. He’s probably been here all night and all day today, I thought.
He tried to talk, but his voice was so hoarse we couldn’t hear him very well. It sounded as though he said, “Get a fire started and get me in bed quick.”
We knew he was right. He seemed to have a bad cold, and even an ordinary cold is dangerous if you don’t take care of yourself. Doctors say that even boys ought to go to bed when they have a bad cold, because if they do, they can get well twice as quick. And when the doctor says to go to bed and you don’t, you might even get pneumonia.
Well, with Old Man Paddler having such a bad cold and maybe a fever, and his being very old, he might get pneumonia too.
We went to work like a nestful of ants. Big Jim told us what to do, and we did it as quick as we could. The first thing we did was to help Old Man Paddler up the stairs, take his shoes off, and get him covered up in bed. It’s a good thing he has long whiskers, I thought, because they helped keep his chest warm.
There were a lot of things that had to be done. We had to start two fires, one in the fireplace and the other in the cookstove. We had to get some water from the spring because all the water in the house was frozen and wouldn’t melt quick enough to get him a drink. He had to have one right away because he was very thirsty. We had to get some canned beef and vegetable soup from the toboggan, because a sick man has to have food that is easy to digest.
Circus and Dragonfly went to the spring for water. Little Jim stood close to Old Man Paddler’s bed and tried to get his knotty old hands warm by holding them in his and rubbing them under the covers. Poetry pulled the toboggan inside and started to unpack it. And all the time it seemed to be getting colder and colder.
Big Jim and I laid the fire in the fireplace the way Boy Scouts do. We hurried as fast as we could because we had to have hot water for the old man’s sprained ankle, and he was still shivering. All the time, while I was doing exactly what Big Jim said, I kept thinking, What if he gets pneumonia? What if we didn’t get here soon enough?
First, Big Jim wrinkled up some dry paper, and on top of it he put some little twigs and split sticks about half as big as a pencil, which I cut for him with the knife I’d found along Sugar Creek. My fingers were so cold they were getting numb. I’d never seen weather get cold so fast in my life.
All around and on top of the little sticks we put some broken, middle-sized sticks. I always did like to watch Big Jim start a fire. First there would be a baby fire, which crackled and sizzled, and the little flames would shoot up like hungry yellow tongues begging for more wood to eat. It always made me think of Mom feeding Charlotte Ann, who would sit in her bassinet or in a chair and wait for the next bite, like the baby fire waiting for us to feed it another stick of wood.
Pretty soon Big Jim straightened up and looked around and said to Old Man Paddler, “Where are the matches?” just as Circus and Dragonfly came in from the spring with a kettle of water. Their faces were as red as a red sunset on account of the cold, and there was ice frozen on the outside of the kettle where it had splashed over—it was that cold. They said they had even had to chop a hole through the ice at the spring to get the water.
Then Big Jim sent Poetry, Dragonfly, and Circus out to shovel the snow away from the door and to make a path down to the spring so it’d be easier to get more water when we needed it.
I guess Old Man Paddler hadn�
��t heard Big Jim’s question about the matches, so we asked him again.
The old man sat up in bed and nodded to a shelf above the table where there was a matchbox.
I hurried to get the box, and Big Jim opened it and looked in.
“It’s empty,” he said, and I thought his voice sounded kind of hollow.
Old Man Paddler tried to raise himself up again. “There’s another box on the end of the shelf, I think.” Then he sank back against the pillow and groaned a little, and I knew we’d have to hurry to get the room warm, or he’d be very sick.
I looked on the shelf, and Big Jim looked, and Little Jim looked. And there wasn’t any matchbox! What if we can’t get afire started at all? I thought. We’ll all freeze to death!
Finally, after we’d all three looked everywhere the old man told us to and still couldn’t find any matches, I happened to remember Poetry’s waterproof matchbox, so I ran to the door and yelled, “Hey, Poetry! Come here. Quick!”
Poetry, who was shoveling snow very fast-to keep warm, I guess—straightened up, and in a fourth of a jiffy he and Dragonfly and Circus all came puffing in.
“What’s the matter?” Poetry asked, looking from one to the other and at the little wigwam of sticks and paper in the fireplace.
“Give me your waterproof matchbox quick!” Big Jim commanded.
“Sure!” Poetry said. He put the end of his right mitten between his teeth, pulled his hand out, and shoved it into his coat pocket. I remembered his matchbox had a compass on one end and a burning glass on the other, so in case you ever ran out of matches, you could start a fire with the glass—that is, if the sun was shining, which it still was that very minute. The place for matches was in the middle.
All of a sudden Poetry’s face took on a scared expression. He bit off the other mitten and began to run his short, fat hands into every pocket he had—his four pants pockets, two in front and two behind, and all his coat pockets.
And there wasn’t any matchbox there! “I-I can’t find it!” Poetry puffed.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 1-6 Page 21
