Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 1-6
Page 23
I felt an exclamation point rising up out of my head, the way they do in cartoons in the newspaper when people are astonished about something. For a minute I didn’t like the idea, because I didn’t like Bob Till. I liked little red-haired Tom, but Bob was so wicked, and he said such awful words and hated Sunday school and was so ignorant he thought boys who loved Jesus were sissies!
None of us said anything for a while. In fact, we didn’t say anything at all, although I saw Poetry’s eyes, and he looked at me disgusted-like. Then I looked at Little Jim, but he still looked like the little lamb I told you about.
Then the old man tore open his nephew’s letter, the one from California, and started to read it. But he didn’t. There seemed to be something else he wanted to say first. He explained to us what his will said—that anybody who was a member of the Sugar Creek Gang could get in on the will, and it was up to us who we got to join the gang, but that nobody could join unless he wanted to.
“Don’t worry about there not being enough for everybody,” he said, “because there is.”
Then the old man told us one of the most important things in the world. I can’t explain it very well even if I do understand it myself. But anybody who wants to have everlasting life and have all his sins forgiven forever and go to heaven can have it—all for nothing—if he’ll let Jesus save him.
It’s all in the sort of “will” Jesus made when He died. There’s enough everlasting life and forgiveness for everybody, and there’s plenty of room in heaven, because God owns the whole world and all of heaven and a million stars and planets. And the only thing that’ll keep people from getting into God’s “will” is their sins, which they won’t be sorry for and won’t quit doing, and their unwillingness to open the door of their stubborn hearts to let Jesus in.
Well, I certainly liked to hear the kind old man explain things about the Bible, but I knew it was hard for him to talk on account of his cold. Even while he was explaining, though, I was making up my mind to try to get Tom Till into both wills.
I guess I was also thinking about that letter from Barry Boyland, which was lying on the pretty, many-colored Indian blanket on Old Man Paddler’s bed. That is, it had been, for just that minute he raised his knees and the letter fell off onto the brown rug beside the bed.
Circus made a dive for the letter and handed it back to the happy old man. He lifted it close to his eyes and began to read.
We could tell the letter had something very interesting in it, because—even though we couldn’t see his eyes very well—we could tell by the way his whiskers moved that the letter was making him happy and that there was a smile buried away down there somewhere.
When we found out what the letter said, there were six of the broadest smiles on six of the happiest boys you ever saw. What do you suppose the letter said?
“Will you read it out loud?” the old man asked Big Jim, maybe because he was our leader. He took off his glasses, and about twenty twinkles were in his eyes.
This is what Big Jim read, and what we listened to:
Dear Uncle Seneth,
[that’s Old Man Paddler’s first name]
Thank you very much for the check for $1,000 which came yesterday. I think your plan to give the Sugar Creek Gang a vacation next year is a very good one.
Tell them that I’ll be driving past Sugar Creek along about July 5 or 6 next year and to be ready. I haven’t decided yet where we’ll camp, but it’ll be near a lake somewhere. Tell Poetry to have his tent ready because some of the boys will have to sleep in it. They may take turns if they like. Bill will need his binoculars, and each boy will need his New Testament as well as his fishing rod and swimming suit. A warm sweater will come in handy too in case we go up into the north woods where it gets cold at night, even in July.
Perhaps Big Jim ought to bring his rifle, because if we do go up north, there’ll be wildcats in the woods that might get a little too friendly …
There was more in the letter, but that was all that especially concerned us. Boy oh boy! That was enough, too! Talk about a flock of noisy blackbirds! We were even worse!
Think of a camping trip in the north woods! For two whole weeks next summer! Of course, we’d have to get our parents’ permission, but that’d be easy because our parents knew what was good for boys.
Now, I am very sorry to say that I’ll have to end this story right here, because it’s long enough. I can’t even tell you about how we had to stay all night in that cabin because of a terrible blizzard that came up before we could start home. But everything came out all right, even if our parents did worry about us and nearly a dozen men came up in the middle of the night to find out if we were all right.
And even if this story wasn’t already long enough, I couldn’t tell you about our camping trip because it hasn’t happened yet. But just as soon as summer comes, and it’s all over, I’ll sit right down the very first thing and write about it for you.
4
SUGAR CREEK GANG
The LOST
CAMPERS
Paul Hutchens
MOODY PUBLISHERS
CHICAGO
© 1941, 1997 by
PAULINE HUTCHENS WILSON
Revised Edition, 1997
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.
Original Title: Sugar Creek Gang Goes Camping
ISBN-10:0-8024-7008-4
ISBN-13: 978-0-8024-7008-9
We hope you enjoy this book from Moody Publishers. Our goal is to provide high-quality, thought-provoking books and products that connect truth to your real needs and challenges. For more information on other books and products written and produced from a biblical perspective, go to www.moodypublishers.com or write to:
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10
Printed in the United States of America
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
There was a big flood in Sugar Creek that spring. Do you remember the time we went to see Old Man Paddler at his cabin in the hills? I guess there never was a snowstorm like that one either. It snowed and snowed and kept on snowing nearly all winter, and that’s the reason there was such a big flood in Sugar Creek when all that snow melted.
But if there hadn’t been a flood in which Little Jim and I almost got drowned, then later on in the summer—when the gang was up north on our camping trip—maybe Poetry and Dragonfly and I all three would have drowned. Poetry and Dragonfly and Little Jim are the names of some of the boys in our gang. I’ll introduce you to them in a minute. So before I can tell you about the tangled-up adventures we had u
p north, I’ll have to give you a chapter or two on the famous Sugar Creek flood.
You see, all that snow melting and running across the fields and down the hills into Sugar Creek made him angry. After he woke up out of his long winter’s sleep, he got out of bed (creek bed) and ran wild all over the country. His fierce brown water sighed and hissed and boiled and roared and spread out over the cornfields and the swamp and the bayou like a savage octopus reaching out his long, brown water-fingers. He caught pigs and cows and logs and even barns and whirled them all downstream, turned them over and over, and smashed them against rocks and cliffs.
Well, a boy isn’t always to blame for all the trouble he gets into. Certainly Little Jim and I weren’t to blame for there being so much snow that winter, and we couldn’t help it that it rained so hard and so much in the spring and caused the flood that was actually the worst flood in the history of Sugar Creek.
Although maybe I shouldn’t have put Little Jim into a big washtub and towed him out through the shallow water to his dad’s hog house, which was standing in water about two feet deep. But Little Jim’s kitten was up on the top of the hog house, meowing like everything, and it looked like the water might get higher. Maybe the kitten—which was a very cute blue-and-white one with an all-white face and a half-white tail—would be drowned, we thought, so we decided to rescue it before the water crept up any higher. And we might just as well have a lot of fun while we were doing it.
Even a boy knows better than to make a raft and float on it out into a mad creek, and we wouldn’t have tried to do such a silly thing, but what we did do turned out to be almost as dangerous. You see, Little Jim’s dad’s low, flat-roofed hog house was standing in very quiet water that had backed up from the bayou into their barnyard. It didn’t look a bit dangerous to do what we decided to do. In fact, it wasn’t, when we started to go out to where the kitten was. And it wouldn’t have been at all, if the dike way up along Sugar Creek hadn’t broken and let loose a wall of water about three feet high. It came rushing upon us and—but that’s getting ahead of the story.
Let me introduce the gang first, in case you’ve never heard about us. There were just six of us up until the time Tom Till joined, and when he joined that made the number seven, which is a perfect number.
First, and best, in our gang was Little Jim, a good-looking kid with shining blue eyes, and a great little Christian. For a while he had about all the religion there was in the Sugar Creek Gang, until the rest of us woke up to the fact that to be a Christian didn’t mean that you had to be sad and wear a long face or be a girl. And we found out that Jesus Himself was a boy once, just our size, and He liked boys even better than our parents do.
Then there was Big Jim, our leader, who had a baby-sized mustache that looked like the fuzz that grows on a baby pigeon. He was the best fighter in the county, and he’d licked the stuffings out of Tom Till’s big brother, Bob. Did I tell you the Till boys’ dad wasn’t a Christian?—that being the reason Tom and Bob didn’t know anything about the Bible and were as mean as an angry old setting hen when you try to break up her nest.
Big Jim and Little Jim weren’t brothers but were just friends, liking each other maybe better than any of us liked the rest of us. Unless it was the way I liked Poetry, which is the name of the barrel-shaped member of our gang, who knows 101 poems by heart and is always quoting one and who has a mind that is like a detective’s. Poetry had a squawky voice like a young rooster learning to crow, and he growled half bass and half soprano when he tried to sing in church.
Then there was Circus, our acrobat, who turned handsprings and somersaults and liked to climb trees better than a healthy boy likes to eat strawberries. Circus’s dad had been an alcoholic, you know, but something happened to him, which the pastor of our church called being “born again,” and after that he was the grandest man a boy could ever have for a father. Except, of course, my own dad, who must have been the best man in the world or my mom wouldn’t have picked him out to marry.
Boy oh boy! You ought to meet my brownish-gray-haired mom and my neat baby sister, Charlotte Ann. Mom isn’t exactly pretty like Little Jim’s mom, but she’s got the nicest face I ever saw. Even when she isn’t saying a word to me, I can feel her face saying nice things to me and Dad and Charlotte Ann, kind of like wireless telegraphy or something.
Let me see—where was I? Oh, yes. I was telling you about the gang. Dragonfly’s the only one I haven’t mentioned. He’s the pop-eyed one of the gang. He has eyes that make me think of a walleyed pike and especially of a dragonfly, which has two great big eyes that are almost as large as its head, which of course Dragonfly’s aren’t. But they’re big anyway, and his nose doesn’t point straight out the way a boy’s nose ought to but turns south right at the end. But after you’ve played with him a few times and know what a great guy he is, you forget all about him being as homely as a mud fence, and you like him a lot. Well, that’s us: Big Jim and Little Jim, and Poetry and Circus, and Dragonfly and red-haired me, Bill Collins. Maybe I ought to tell you that I have a fiery temper that sometimes goes off just like a firecracker and is always getting me into trouble.
And now, here goes the story of the flood that was the worst flood in the history of Sugar Creek. Even Old Man Paddler, the kind, white-whiskered old man who lives up in the hills and was one of the pioneers of the Sugar Creek territory, can’t remember any flood that was worse.
That old man knows so many important things, and he can tell some of the most exciting tales of the Sugar Creek of long ago. Maybe someday I’ll see if I can coax him into writing about the terrible blizzard of 1880 and of the old trapper whom the Indians got jealous of because he caught so many more beavers than they did. They shot him through the heart with an arrow one morning while he was setting his traps. Old Man Paddler has told us boys that story many times.
Well, after we’d saved the old man’s life that cold, snowy day, which I told you about in my last book, The Winter Rescue, and after my dad and Circus’s dad and a lot of other men had waded through the storm up into the hills to get us—and after we finally got home safely the next day—it began to snow and snow, and all the roads were blocked, and we had to actually dig a tunnel through the big drift next to our barn before we could get in.
After a while, though, a nice long while in which Charlotte Ann kept on growing and learning to say “Daddy” and to sit up without being propped with a pillow, spring began to come. First, there ’d be a nice warm day, then a cold one, then rain and more rain, and a warm day again. Then one day in late March, old Sugar Creek started to wake up from his long winter’s nap.
About a week before the actual flood, when the creek was still frozen, our gang was standing on the big bridge that goes across the deepest and widest part, looking down at the dirty, snow-covered, slushy-looking ice. And all of a sudden we heard a deep rumbling roar that started right under the bridge and thundered all the way up the creek toward the spring, sounding like an angry thunderclap with a long noisy tail dragging itself across the sky.
Little Jim cried out as though someone had hurt him. “What is that?” He looked as if he was afraid, which he is sometimes.
And Big Jim said, “That? That’s the ice cracking. It’s breaking up, and in a few days maybe it’ll all break and crack up into a million pieces and go growling downstream, and when it does, it’ll be something to look at! See those big ugly scars on that old elm tree over there? Away up high almost to the first limb? That’s where the ice crashed against it last year. See where the paint is knocked off the bridge abutment down there? The ice was clear up there last year.”
Crash! Roar-r-r-r-zzzz! The ice was breaking up all right because it was a warm day and all the snow was melting too.
We stayed there watching Sugar Creek’s frozen old face, and I thought about all the nice fish that were down under there. And I was wondering if maybe the radio report was right, that it was going to rain for a week beginning that very night, and what’d happen to the litt
le fishies who got lost from their parents and in the swift current were whirled away downstream to some other part of the country.
Well, the radio was right. It began to rain that night, and it kept right on. The ice melted and broke and began to float downstream. It gathered itself into great chunks of different sizes and shapes and looked like a million giant-sized ice cubes out of somebody’s refrigerator, only they acted as though they were alive. The brown water of Sugar Creek pushed them from beneath and squeezed its way out through the cracks between pieces and ran over the top, churning and boiling and grinding and cracking and roaring and sizzling and fussing like an old setting hen.
I tell you, it was a great sight to see and great to listen to, and we had the feeling all the time that something was going to happen.
And something did happen—not that day but soon after that, on a Saturday. I had gone over to Little Jim’s house on an errand for Mom, although she and I had just made up an errand so I’d have a good excuse to go over there.
You see, Little Jim’s pet bear had had to be sold to the zoo. It was getting too big to be a pet and was sometimes very cross and might get angry someday and hurt somebody. Little Jim’s parents had bought a blue-and-white kitten for him so that he wouldn’t be so lonesome. As I told you, the kitten’s face was all white, and it had a half-white tail, making it about the prettiest kitten I ever saw.
I had on my hip-high rubber boots when I came sloshing into Little Jim’s backyard about two o’clock that afternoon, just as he was finishing practicing his piano lesson, which was a hard piece by somebody named Liszt.
The sun was shining down very hot for a spring day. I could hear Sugar Creek sighing about a fourth of a mile down the road, and I wished we could go down there and watch the flood. But our parents wouldn’t let us stand on the bridge anymore, because it wasn’t safe. Some bridges farther up the creek had actually been washed out.