Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 19-24

by Paul Hutchens

  Big Jim was pretty grim when he swooped down upon Dragonfly, pried the letter out of his clutching hands, and scolded him. “We decided not to open it! You’ve gone against the whole gang!”

  Dragonfly pouted up at him, while different ones of the rest of us picked up the things that had fallen out of the handbag and put them back. “Little Jim voted against the whole gang! We’d voted to read the letter! I was just doing what we voted to do!”

  Of course, he was right even if he was wrong. Anyway, now that the letter was already open and part of it had been read by part of us, we decided maybe it would be all right if the rest of us read the rest of it. And it was a good thing we did. I’ll tell you why in a minute.

  When Big Jim read the letter out loud, here is what my astonished ears heard:

  Dear Connie,

  It was such a thrill to get your letter telling of your good times at the Ski Festival. How I wish I could be there now to take some of the runs with you, but that pleasure must wait till after New Year’s, when I will have wound up the roping, riding, and wrestling season down here. I’ll be rushing to the nearest plane, Connie, and when I get to Denver, will charter a special to fly me to Aspen. I’ll have to leave Pal here, because I do have a couple rodeos in California before spring. Next summer, I’ll ship him home. Now that Lindy and I own the Snow-slide, we plan to make it our headquarters, and Pal and I will go into retirement together.

  I hope you don’t mind my being a little jealous of Charlie. He’s a good ski instructor, which may partly account for your learning so well so fast. I hope you don’t mind what I’m going to say next, Connie. New Year’s in the past at Aspen has been a bit too partyish. With drinking so popular nowadays, you’ll find it a lot easier if you’ll spend most of the time with Lindy. Charlie is quite a drinker. Now that you’ve gone so many months without a drink—well, you know how much a certain cowboy down in Tucson cares. Enough said there.

  One thing more, though. Charlie does have times of depression when he acts very strange. He’s a spoiled boy, and when he doesn’t get his way, he can be very difficult. I am very sorry to learn from Lindy that he has proposed marriage, for—well, I must tell you—he already has a wife and two children down here. I met her yesterday. One of the first things she asked when she saw me was, “Does Charlie still have his spells of despondency?”

  While Big Jim was reading aloud to us, I had the feeling that we were hearing what wasn’t supposed to be our business. But when he read the next paragraph, I was glad he did. Part of it was:

  To really retire, Connie, a cowboy needs a wife. You may consider this a proposal if you like. But if you don’t like a proposal by letter, I’ll ask you in person when I get there. I wouldn’t hurry it up like this, but I want you to know that I believe in you, that I believe you’ll never drink again. We’ll let the past be forever past.

  The rest of the letter wasn’t any of our business, and since it isn’t any of yours, either, I won’t write it for you. We quick put it back into the envelope.

  Big Jim closed the handbag and was going to carry it himself the rest of the way to the Snow-slide, but when Dragonfly begged so hard and promised so tearfully he would be careful, Big Jim let him. That’s how it happened that when, a few minutes later, we reached the parking area of the base station, that spindle-legged little guy had Connie Mae Spruce’s handbag hanging by its strap on his shoulder.

  The chairlift motors had stopped, and all the chairs on both cables up and down the long slope were swinging empty, which meant everybody was already down and the lift was closed for the day.

  We swung past the base station building, and my heart was beating fast as I wondered if the engineer was really Charlie Paxton, and if he was … well, if he was, what then?

  “Everybody wait a minute,” Poetry said. “There’s something I want to ask the engineer.”

  “Not now!” Big Jim ordered him, adding, “We’ve got to hurry on!”

  “Now,” Poetry said grimly and quick puffed to the open door of the engineer’s room.

  I followed him in, seeing first of all a big sign on a bulletin board that read DO NOT TALK TO THE ENGINEER!

  And then I saw the engineer himself. Of course, I’d seen him before, but this time I really noticed him. And what to my wondering eyes should appear but first of all his Western shirt with caballero cuffs and on its front a design that looked like the purple cactus I’d stepped on a half hour ago back on the mesa. Also he was limping a little.

  Poetry smiled his famous smile and asked, “Sir, may we ignore that order?”

  “We’re about to wind things up for the day.” The engineer had a gruff voice and a mustache the size of an eyebrow. He looked at all of us a little impatiently. “I guess you can ask one question.” He seemed a little bored.

  Poetry’s question was, “Could anybody who happened to push that lever right there start the chairlift?”

  The engineer eyed Poetry’s innocent face with a question mark in his dark eyes. “Anybody could,” he said indifferently. He turned his back, sat down at a black-topped desk, opened a register of some kind, and started to study it.

  Poetry was not satisfied with just one question. He popped another. It was startling even to me, but I wasn’t prepared for the way it exploded the man into action. Poetry’s all-of-a-sudden question was, “Did you come down here in the middle of the night of December the thirty-first last winter in a blinding blizzard and find the motors running and the chairlift going—and turn it off?”

  The man in the Western shirt with the purple cactus design on its front spun around in his swivel chair and barked, “Listen, sonny, there’s a sign up there! And I am busy!” He opened a drawer at his right, took out some kind of record book, and shoved the drawer closed, but not before I had seen what looked like a revolver. In that fleeting glimpse, I noticed the gun had a blue barrel and a walnut grip.

  But it wasn’t what I saw in the desk drawer that seemed so important to the man with the mustache. Instead, it was what he saw when Dragonfly, who had been just outside the door, came bursting in to say, “Hurry up, you guys! I’m hungry! I’m—”

  The engineer’s eyes focused on the handbag hanging by its strap on Dragonfly’s shoulder. He sprang out of his swivel chair, staring and exclaiming, “Where did you get that?”

  Right that second I heard outside the sound of galloping hooves and saw through the window somebody on a beautiful palomino headed straight for the base station where we were. It was the king of the cowboys in his black Stetson and black shirt with the gold stripes, coming maybe to find out why we were so late for our chuck-wagon dinner.

  The muscular engineer must have seen and heard, also. He made a dive for Dragonfly and demanded, “Here, sonny, let me have that!”

  And that’s when something clicked in my mind, the way an alarm clock sometimes clicks a fraction of a second before it goes off, and I knew, knew, that the base engineer was for sure the man whose name had been on the ski magazine—and also that Charlie Paxton was the man Cranberry Jones hated but didn’t want to and couldn’t help it!

  I let out a warning cry to Dragonfly. “Don’t let him have it! Run! Run for your life!”

  And Dragonfly ran. That rascal of a spindle-legged, scared little boy, still believing maybe that finders are keepers, streaked toward the door.

  Charlie Paxton also streaked toward it and got there first. Dragonfly ducked out of his grasp, swung past me and around behind the office desk with the panting engineer right after him.

  There was plenty going on in that office, I tell you—and in a few minutes there’d be still more when Cranberry Jones came in, which he was bound to do to see what was going on and why.

  Dragonfly was like a mouse in a house with a woman with a broom after him. He dodged this way and that and that way and this, then toward the door of a room just off the office. But he didn’t make it. Charlie got there at the same time and in a flash had him in his clutches. That is, he had one arm.

>   And that’s when our basketball practice back home came in handy. Dragonfly made a quick, over-his-head pass in my direction. The handbag came flying through the air with the greatest of ease. I made a leap for it, caught it, and came down in Charlie’s arms.

  The alarm clock in my mind went off again, and this time it was my temper catching fire. I wasn’t going to let Connie Mae Spruce’s handbag get into the possession of the man who had maybe been to blame for whatever had happened to her. I ducked, squirmed, twisted, and with a wham-wham-wham with my spare fist on the man’s stomach and chest and chin, I broke loose. I started on a headfirst dash for the open door and ran ker-smack into Cranberry Jones, who had heard such a commotion he had sprung from his horse to see what was in motion.

  Now what do you do at a time like that? When you are in the middle of dangerous excitement like the one we were in. You have a lost-and-found handbag belonging to a lost-and-not-yet-found woman. In the handbag is a picture of Cranberry Jones on his palomino. And you are absolutely sure the woman whose picture is also in the handbag has been frozen to death and eaten by wild animals after her fall from a chairlift. What do you do at a time like that?

  I had been running so fast when I whammed into Cranberry that I bowled him over, and the two of us went down in the graveled parking area five feet from the still-open base station office door.

  It took us several seconds to get untangled. And that’s when Cranberry saw the handbag—although I could tell by the startled expression on his face that it wasn’t the first time. I held it out to him, saying, “We found it this afternoon away over in Wild Horse Canyon.”

  For a second there was a scared expression on his face as he stood staring at the handbag. His jaw was set, and I could feel how hot his temper was and what a hurt heart he had.

  Circus shattered the tense silence right then by saying, “Those teeth marks were made by a porcupine. Porcupines don’t eat people.”

  I think I realized he was trying to say something cheerful, trying to make Cranberry think Connie Mae Spruce was still alive. But it seemed he only made him feel worse. “No,” the cowboy said, “porcupines don’t. But mountain lions do.”

  And that made me think of the mountain lion that had been sneaking around Pal’s corral and of the pistol Cranberry Jones right that minute probably had in a shoulder holster. Also, it reminded me that there was another revolver in a desk drawer just behind the engineer.

  11

  Even though there wasn’t a gun in sight, there were bullets in Cranberry Jones’s eyes and another expression in Charlie Paxton’s—if the engineer was Charlie Paxton. It was a sort of wild expression as if he was half out of his mind. The way they were glaring at each other, their jaws set, was like two dogs back at Sugar Creek, standing looking at each other and growling and waiting for one or the other to make a move. Then with a flurry of flashing tempers and slashing teeth, the dogs are headfirst into a barking, snapping, growling, yelping fang fight.

  I certainly never expected things to take the turn they did right then, for I never dreamed what was going on in Little Jim’s mind. But I might have guessed it, knowing what a kind heart he had, and how, back at Sugar Creek when he’d been looking through his tears at his drowned kitten, he’d sobbed, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” Also, every now and then, when it seemed the right time, he’d quote a Bible verse, one of the more than a hundred he knew by heart.

  Anyway, right in the center of the whirlwind of anger and hot temper and hate I could feel all around us, that friendly little fellow called out in his cute little mouselike voice, “Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer!”

  Just that second there was the sound of an engine at the farther end of the parking lot. I saw it was Little Jim’s father and mother in the station wagon, also having come to look for us, wondering maybe why six ordinarily hungry boys were late for a chuck-wagon dinner we’d been looking forward to all day.

  It was like having to stop fishing when the biting is extra good, to have to leave and go to dinner. Harder than that was to understand why, all of a sudden, there didn’t seem to be any fight in Cranberry Jones’s mind. “All right, Charlie,” he said. “The boys’re coming over for a talk about this later!”

  Even though his tone of voice was like a kind hand stroking a kitten, I could feel that Charlie, the kitten, didn’t like it and any second might get mad and start scratching, which our old Mixy cat does when you stroke her fur the wrong way. When Cranberry said “this,” he’d held up the handbag by its shoulder strap. And when his eyes met Charlie’s again, there was fire in them.

  The word “Charlie” struck my mind kind of hard. Now I really knew that the base station engineer was Charlie Paxton, whose name had been on the corner of the ski magazine and who had asked Connie Mae Spruce to marry him when he already had a wife and two children.

  This, for sure, was the man Cranberry Jones hated and didn’t want to. Before long there’d have to be a showdown between the two.

  Little Jim’s folks, not knowing what a whirlwind we were in, called out to us, “Hurry up, boys! It’s way past six o’clock!”

  And we hurried—all except Cranberry, who took a little extra time to get to his palomino, taking Connie Mae Spruce’s handbag with him.

  All the time while we were having our chuck-wagon dinner in a grassy enclosure behind the Snow-slide and just across from the mariposa swimming pool, I kept thinking about our mystery, worrying about what had happened to Connie Mae Spruce and what Charlie Paxton knew about what had really become of her. I didn’t get to fully enjoy the very different kind of dinner we were having. Our big tin plates were heaped with all kinds of cowboy chuck taken from the back end of the wagon, and we were eating outdoors at a redwood table. You can’t worry and enjoy eating at the same time.

  I wasn’t the only one that was worrying, and I didn’t have half as much to upset my mind as Cranberry. First, as we always do when we eat in a public place, we waited with bowed heads till each of us had finished thinking his thanks to God.

  I should have kept my eyes closed a little longer, I suppose, but for some reason I didn’t. Instead, I was studying Cranberry’s set face. His eyes were looking straight ahead. I turned to see what he was staring at, and there wasn’t a thing there except the six-foot-high stockade fence about fifty feet away

  Poetry must have had his eyes open a little early, too, because the minute the silent prayer was finished and everybody was talking to everybody, with nobody listening to anybody, my pumpkin-shaped friend whispered to me, “Remember what he asked us to pray for last night?”

  As soon as I could get a word out around the corner of the bite of barbecued beef I had just taken, I answered, “Yes, and the man he hates is Charlie Paxton, and Charlie Paxton is the engineer at the base station!”

  Right then Dragonfly raised his voice and demanded, “Why doesn’t anybody listen to me? I’m trying to tell you how I found a woman’s handbag this afternoon—with porcupine teeth marks on it and with a picture of Cranberry Jones in it and another picture of a woman in a riding outfit on his horse, and there was a letter in it to her from Cranberry and—”

  Well, because Little Jim’s parents hadn’t heard the story yet, quite a few of us started in helping Dragonfly tell what we knew, but we got cut in on by Cranberry, who, with an indifferent voice, said to the Foote parents, “So many people write to me for pictures, I had a few thousand made last year, and Lindy sends them out.”

  What, I thought, on earth! And I also thought, He doesn’t know we read the letter he wrote her.

  Poetry answered Cranberry then, saying, “I wonder how she got a picture of herself riding on your horse.”

  Cranberry gave Little Jim’s folks a knowing look that seemed to say, “We might as well keep as much from the boys as we can.” Then he answered Poetry. “There are a lot of palominos around the country. They all look alike. A girl could get quite a charge out of showing the two pictures to her f
riends.”

  Imagine that! And imagine anybody thinking what was going on was too exciting for six boys with grown-up minds to know about! Why, right that very second we knew as much about the mystery—and maybe more—than Cranberry himself!

  After we’d finished our chuck-wagon dinner and there was a little time left before Little Jim’s folks were going to the evening concert in the big tent—the gang was not going but would go tomorrow afternoon to the Youth Concert—Poetry and I moseyed around the mariposa pool. We stopped a minute at the Hello Tree, listening to the ribbon-stemmed aspen leaves to see if in the evening breezes they were actually talking. And then just that second, when there was an all-of-a-sudden breeze, I could actually hear voices.

  The only thing was that when the breeze had passed, there still were voices, and they were the voices of two men just outside the stockade fence.

  “Sh!” Poetry whispered. “Listen!”

  I didn’t need any shushing or his order to listen. The voices belonged to Cranberry Jones and Little Jim’s pop.

  Poetry and I quick crouched under the low branches of the aspen and crawled cautiously to the fence, getting there just in time to hear Cranberry say, “I phoned the police about the handbag. It’s the first big clue they’ve had in the case, thanks to the boys. I know Charlie knows a lot more about what happened to her than he’ll tell. I’m afraid he got her drinking on New Year’s Eve. Did it knowing she was an alcoholic. And if he did, that makes him a murderer. And I’m a murderer, too, for hating him—as that fine boy of yours reminded me today. ‘Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer.’ Mr. Foote, God’ll really have to help me. I’m afraid of what I might do if I meet him alone! He’s a scoundrel, a cheat, and an ungodly wretch. When I think of his sweet little wife and two precious children I met down in Arizona—needing a husband and father, without enough food and clothes …”