Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 1-6

by Paul Hutchens

  Pretty soon we were in Santa’s section of the city, which was called “suburban.” The El came to a smooth stop, and the doors slid open. Out we went onto the platform. And there is where the fight bomb exploded.

  I didn’t get to hear who said what to whom, but I heard scuffling on the platform behind me. I looked just in time to see Bob’s very hard fist sweep around in a fierce circle and go smashing toward Big Jim’s face.

  At the same time Big Jim ducked, and Bob, who had swung with his whole body behind that blow, made a complete circle, his fist hitting nothing but some of Chicago’s kind of dirty air.

  It was such a vicious swing, and so hard, and Bob whirled so fast, that when Big Jim’s jaw wasn’t there to stop the fist, Bob lost his balance and fell backward over the edge of the top step. Down he went, his head crashing against the side of an old iron railing. My eyes could hardly follow him, he went so fast down that long flight of iron steps, bumpety-bump. He didn’t even try to stop himself.

  I guess I was the first one to see how he looked when he got to the bottom, since I was closest to the top of the stairway. I couldn’t have moved if I’d had to. I felt just like a person does when he’s looking over the edge of a very high embankment and is afraid. I was as weak as a sick kitten. Maybe I’d have tumbled down myself if my knees hadn’t buckled under me and I went down kerflop on the top step.

  The next thing right after that, Barry was flying down to where Bob was lying very still and white and—red! He was bleeding terribly from a gash in his head.

  I got to my feet and scrambled down too, along with most of the Sugar Creek Gang and a lot of other people. But there weren’t one-tenth as many people who had been on that El car as there might have been on a weekday, because, as I found out later, not even a fourth of the people in Chicago go to church on Sundays. There are hundreds of thousands of children who don’t go at all, their parents making them go to school but not to church.

  There at the bottom of the stairs, on a little platform where the stairway turned at a right angle before going down the rest of the way, was Bob, lying with his face on the end of a step, and he was pale and unconscious.

  I was only halfway down those stairs when somebody went past me like a rocket, and it was Big Jim. By the time I got there, Big Jim and Barry were trying to stop the bleeding the way experienced Scouts know how to do. But they didn’t have any equipment, and it wasn’t easy.

  Things happened pretty fast after that. They had to. You know, doctors nearly always advise a person not to move anybody who has been in a car wreck, especially if he’s been crushed in the chest. There might be a broken rib that might puncture a hole in a lung like a boy puncturing a balloon, or else his smashed chest wall might press against his heart and kill him. They say in a case like that to keep the person lying very quiet until the doctor comes and let him decide what to do.

  Barry, though, had been studying medicine. He saw right away there weren’t any broken bones, unless maybe it would be a fractured skull, the bony framework of a person’s head, where your mind lives. In fact, you live there yourself, and if your house gets smashed up, you have to move out.

  I thought about that while we were on the way to the hospital where they were taking Bob. I thought, What if Bob Till has to move out? Where will he go? I knew he wasn’t any dumb animal, and that he had a soul that would live forever somewhere, and that his dad would be pretty much to blame if he didn’t go to heaven.

  In fact, while they were carrying Bob’s limp body—his new shirt all messed up and spattered with blood—to Santa’s car, which was waiting for us at the El station, I wished every boy’s parents would have Bible reading at their family table and would take their children to Sunday school and church. I even wished I was president of the United States, so I could help have a law passed that would make every boy in America go to church, whichever one he wanted to, at least once a week until he was twenty-one years old. After that, maybe he’d have sense enough to go himself and to obey God’s laws.

  I said that to Poetry, who was sitting beside me in the taxi.

  “All right,” he said, very seriously for him, “and I’ll be vice president. We’ll declare a national emergency and start the biggest war on the devil there ever was.”

  I’d never seen such a big hospital. There were more sick people in that one hospital than there were well people in all Sugar Creek township! But it seemed to be a very wonderful place.

  I don’t know how I ever got to do what I did. Maybe it was because Barry knew I was going to be a doctor and arranged for me to watch what happened, which they don’t generally let a boy do in a hospital.

  They let me watch them give Bob Till a blood transfusion, which means taking blood out of somebody and giving it to somebody else. They had to give blood to Bob on account of his having lost so much, and maybe he couldn’t have lived without it.

  In fact, it looked for a while as if he might die that very afternoon.

  12

  The first thing they did with Bob after they got him into bed in the hospital, with nurses busy going everywhere in a white hurry, was to decide to give him a blood transfusion, and it would have to be done right away.

  Pretty soon an official-looking nurse came in with a little tray that had some glass tubes on it. She looked around at all of us and then went straight to Bob’s bed, rubbed something on his finger, and then pricked it with a needle.

  “Wh-what’s th-that for?” Dragonfly asked me, and I felt proud to think I knew what to tell him, because I’d already been studying and trying to learn all I could about medicine.

  “That,” I said with a grim face, “is to test his blood so as to find out what type it is, so she’ll know what kind to give him. If you give him the wrong kind, the two won’t mix right, and the blood cells will clump together and kill him.”

  I guess I said the last part too loud, for Tom turned as pale as his brother already was.

  It took the nurse only a minute to do what she had to do, and then she was gone, and we were kept waiting.

  “She’s the laboratory technician,” I said to the rest of the Sugar Creek Gang, trying to look very businesslike.

  We learned they had in that hospital what are called “blood banks,” which have blood all ready to give to people. As soon as they knew what kind you had to have, they opened one of the little banks and gave you some.

  All the time, Bob was sighing and acting very weak and faint. I can’t take time now to tell you all the different things the Sugar Creek Gang said to each other or what I thought while we waited, but before long I knew things weren’t working out right.

  The nurse I told you about, the “laboratory technician,” found out that Bob’s blood was what is called type B, and no more than seven out of one hundred people in the world have that. And the hospital didn’t have any blood in its banks like that. They’d had to use it all that very morning for somebody else!

  Things looked very bad for a while. Barry and Santa both had type A, so they couldn’t use their blood. They already knew that, and they told the doctor so.

  Big Jim was standing right beside me, with his fists doubled up, not ready to fight Bob Till but—I soon learned—to fight for him.

  Suddenly Big Jim’s doubled-up fists doubled up still tighter, and he walked over to the doctor, who had been out and had just come back in. They had been telephoning different people in the city who had type B and couldn’t find anybody who could come to the hospital. One man lived on the other side of the city, and it would take an hour for him to get there.

  So Big Jim set his jaw and walked toward that hospital bed and toward the doctor. I knew they wouldn’t want any boy to be a blood giver, so I gasped. And again in my thoughts I was back in Sugar Creek, looking up toward the top of Bumblebee Hill, where Bob Till and his rough, swearing gang of boys were hollering at us and calling us cowards and Sunday school sissies. Then, with my mind’s eyes, I saw Big Jim step out of the bushes where we’d been hiding
and march right up the hill toward them.

  “Fellows,” he’d said that day, “it isn’t a question of whether we’re afraid to fight. There isn’t a man among us that’s got a drop of coward’s blood in him!”

  And now here we were in the hospital room with Bob maybe about to die, and Big Jim was going to prove that he still didn’t have a drop of coward’s blood in him and was going to offer to give his blood to save his enemy.

  Big Jim, who had had a transfusion himself when he was little, happened to remember that his blood was type B.

  That second I felt Little Jim’s hand push its way into one of mine, and I knew that, if he could, he’d have told me something he was thinking about. I found out afterward it was a verse from the Bible, which says, “God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”

  “How old are you?” the kind doctor asked.

  “Almost fifteen,” Big Jim said. I noticed he was standing half on tiptoe to make himself look tall.

  They had to telephone home to Big Jim’s parents to explain it and to get their permission; and the technician had to check his blood with Bob’s anyway to be sure it was what is called “compatible,” which means they were friendly to each other and wouldn’t fight. Well, they found out they wouldn’t, and I couldn’t help but remember Bumblebee Hill again.

  They took Big Jim down the long hall and onto an elevator and up to the surgery room, and Barry and I were allowed to go along with him and the doctor and the technician and a nurse and two students who were just learning how to be nurses.

  That was a funny-looking room. It had a great big chandelier above the operating table—which looked like my mom’s ironing board but was longer and wider.

  They laid Big Jim down just as if they were going to operate on him.

  I couldn’t see very well, because I had to peep through the open spaces between doctors and nurses who were standing around watching or helping. But I could see a little glass jar with a rubber bulb on top of it. There was a tube with a needle fastened to one end, and the other end was fastened to the glass jar.

  Big Jim stretched out his arm for them to use. The next thing I knew they had a big needle stuck into one of his veins right in the crook of his arm, and then, with somebody working the rubber bulb, the glass jar began to show red in the bottom, and I knew Big Jim was giving his life’s blood to save Bob Till.

  Once he moved his head and looked over at me, and I looked at him, and I guess right that minute I never liked anybody better in all my life. I wished I could have dived in there and got hold of his other hand and squeezed it tight to let him know how I felt.

  Higher and higher the blood line crept toward the middle of the glass jar, the brightest red I’d ever seen, brighter than the pretty roses that grow in Mom’s garden. And then I looked at Big Jim’s cheeks, and they weren’t as rosy as they had been.

  Maybe if I hadn’t had Christian parents and a Sunday school teacher who believed the Bible, or if I hadn’t happened to have Little Jim for a friend, I wouldn’t have thought of what I did just then. But I thought for a minute of Somebody who had had both arms stretched out, and He was hanging high on a big, ugly wooden cross and was letting His very special blood flow out for all the sinners in the world. And now, whoever wants to can believe in Him and have everlasting life.

  And for a bit my thoughts got mixed up a little. Instead of seeing Big Jim there, in my mind I saw Jesus, who didn’t have a drop of coward’s blood in Him but volunteered to die to save the whole world. And now anybody in the world who will trust in the blood of Jesus to wash away his sins will be saved forever and ever.

  They gave Big Jim some kind of medicine right after that, and even though he was very weak for a while and a little pale, he didn’t have much trouble getting over giving blood, because Big Jim was the kind of a boy who took good care of his body. He was proud of his strong body, and he let God be the boss of his health and his mind too.

  I hated to leave him and go to watch them give the blood to Bob, but I thought I ought to so I could write it all down for you to read. (Some of these things I’ve had to ask Barry about, and some of them my dad, and that’s how I happen to know the names for different things.) So pretty soon I was down in the hospital room with the rest of them.

  In a jiffy they had Bob’s arm ready. They put a needle in the vein at the crook of his elbow and hung up the glass jar on some kind of a stand that was a little bit like a cross, then let the blood run down through a long tube into Bob’s arm. It went down very slowly, dripping in, somebody told me afterward.

  The gang stood in a sort of football huddle, watching the whole thing. I kept looking at Little Tom’s face to see how he felt about his brother.

  Pretty soon, Bob’s cheeks began to show a little pink, and then he looked better. He quit sighing, and in just a little while he was asleep, and his life was saved. Anyway, that’s the story of the Sugar Creek Gang in Chicago. Nobody in the world ever had more interesting things to see, or had more fun, or learned more than we did. Of course, we still had to have that Sunday night meeting in the church, and the Labor Day meeting in Santa’s church, but that’s too much to put into this story.

  We also still had ahead of us the airplane trip back home, and the next day after we got home we had to start back to school.

  And that reminds me! We had a new teacher that year, and—as boys do sometimes when a new teacher comes—we had to find out the very first week whether she would stand for any monkey business or whether we had to behave ourselves all the time.

  We tried different methods, but none of them really worked until the day Poetry tried to do what the girl in a poem did once. He let one of his dad’s pet lambs follow him to school.

  This lamb had to have a rope tied around its neck before it would follow Poetry, though. And before he got it to school, it fell into a mud puddle, and its fleece wasn’t as white as snow when it got there. Neither was the schoolhouse floor after the lamb had walked around the room a while. All that was before the teacher came that morning!

  I guess I’ll rest a while before I tell you about what happened when she did.

  Moody Press, a ministry of the Moody Bible Institute,

  is designed for education, evangelization, and edification.

  If we may assist you in knowing more about Christ

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  Moody Press, c/o MLM, Chicago, Illinois 60610.

  Paul Hutchens

  MOODY PUBLISHERS

  CHICAGO

  © 1942, 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 in School

  ISBN-10: 0-8024-7010-6

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8024-7010-2

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  PREFACE

  Hi—from a member of the Sugar Creek

  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

  I f I hadn’t been the janitor of our little one-room red brick schoolhouse, I don’t suppose I would have cared so much when Poetry’s wet pet lamb walked around all over the floor with his muddy feet.

  Lambs, you know, are not supposed to go to school, and even though the Sugar Creek Gang knew that, they thought they’d like to see what it was like to have one come in spite of the fact that it was, as a certain poem says, “against the rule.”

  It certainly made the children laugh and play—and it also made some of them cry and work, especially me. That is, I had to mop the floor, and I had to stay in at recess to do it, with Poetry and all the rest of the gang helping me. It took longer to get the floor clean than it should have, because the lamb accidentally turned over a pail of sudsy water, and it scattered itself in every direction there was.

  Maybe before I tell you what the teacher said about the lamb at school, I’d better explain why it was there, and who I mean when I say “Poetry,” and also when I say “The Sugar Creek Gang,” because maybe you’ve never heard about us. Then you’ll understand that we really weren’t trying to get ourselves into trouble when we took that innocent lamb to school that Monday morning.