Part 2

Well, in a jiffy, there we all were, standing around in a sort of half circle, looking over each other’s shoulders and between each other’s heads, right in front of Old Man Paddler’s dead wife’s tall tombstone. Her name had been Sarah Paddler, and she had died a long time ago. There were a couple of other tombstones there too, for the old man’s two boys who had died about the same time many years ago, and that old kind old man, whom the Sugar Creek Gang loved so well, had maybe been using all the love which he had had left over, when his own boys died, and, instead of wasting it on a dog or a lot of other things, he was pouring it out on us live boys instead.

Carved or chiselled on the tombstone was the figure of a hand with the forefinger pointing up toward the sky, and right below the hand were the words:

“There is Rest in Heaven.”

Standing on a little ledge, and fastened onto the tombstone with what is called scotch tape, was another envelope like the one we had just found and had read down at the Black Widow Stump, and on it it said,

URGENT To the Sugar Creek Gang (Personal. Open at once.)

Well, this time Big Jim took the envelope, and handed it to Little Jim who read it in his squeaky voice to all of us, and this is what it said in rhyme:

“The Sugar Creek Gang is on the right track Now turn right around and hurry right back-- Go straight to the old hollow sycamore tree, And there if you look, you will see what you see.”

This time it didn’t say it was signed by “Guess Who,” but the poetry sounded like Poetry’s poetry, and I looked at him and he was busy studying the ground around there to see if he could find any shoe tracks.

“Last one to the sycamore tree is a cow’s tail,” Circus said, and started to make a dive for the cemetery fence just as Dragonfly got a queer look on his face, like he was going to sneeze but wasn’t quite sure whether he was or not. Dragonfly looked toward the sun, which hurt his eyes a little, and that maybe made tears, which, with his face raised like that, tickled his nose on the _inside_ and he let out one of his favorite sneezes, which was half blocked like a football kick, but went off to one side. Then he sneezed again three times, just as fast as if he couldn’t help it, and said, “I’m allergic to something in this old graveyard. I’m allergic to ghosts.”

Right away we were all dashing toward the barbed-wire fence, and all of us got through without tearing our clothes and went zippety-zip-zip dash, swerve, swish-swish-swish, toward the spring again, and down the path that led along the top of the hill toward Sugar Creek Bridge, and then across the old north road, and up a steep bank and down the path again toward the old sycamore tree and the swamp, and also toward the entrance to the cave which is a long cave, as you know, and the other end comes out in the basement of Old Man Paddler’s log cabin back up in the hills.

“I’m thirsty,” Poetry puffed beside me.

“So am I,” I said, and right that second I remembered that when I’d gone to the spring in the first place, more than maybe an hour ago, I’d taken a water pail from our milk house and was supposed to bring back a pail of sparkling cool water, when I came home. “There isn’t any hurry,” Pop had told me, “but when you do come back be _sure_ to bring a pail of water.”

“I will,” I had said to him, and now as we whizzed past the spring, I remembered that the water pail was on a flat stone down at the bottom of the hill at the spring.

“Who do you suppose is writing all these notes?” I said to Poetry, forgetting the water again.

“Yeah, who do you suppose?” Poetry said to me from behind me, he being so fat he couldn’t keep up. “I know something I won’t tell,” he said to me, and when I said, “What?” he said, “Two little ‘niggers’ in a peanut shell.”

“Don’t call ’em niggers!” a voice behind us said, and it was Little Jim’s voice.

“Why not?” Dragonfly wanted to know.

Say, Little Jim’s voice which most of the time was very mild and kind, spoke up like it was angry and said, “’Cause negroes are real people, and ’cause--”

Right that second Little Jim’s words got mixed up with a grunt which came out of his throat at the same time, and sounded so queer I turned around to see what happened, ’cause I knew something had, and my eyes lit on him just in time to see him turn a lopsided flipflop on the ground. He had stumbled over a root with his bare right big toe, or else caught his bare right big toe in his overall leg and stumbled and fell sprawling.

I stopped quick, got bumped into by Poetry, who was behind me, but didn’t fall down myself, whirled around and went back to help Little Jim get up.

Circus and Big Jim were far ahead of us. “Did you get hurt?” Little Tom Till asked, and Little Jim sat up rubbing his elbow and grinning and said, “You shouldn’t call em niggers, ’cause they’re human beings and God made ’em. My mother and dad have adopted a little black boy in Africa for a whole year. You can adopt one for only $52.00 a year.”

Say, that little guy had the most innocent lamb-like look on his face you ever saw. He was always saying things like that, and not a one of us thought he was too religious or anything. In fact, everyone of us had already become Christians ourselves, only most of us weren’t quite as brave as Little Jim was, just talking right out about what we thought, without caring what anybody said, most of us thinking a lot more than we said. Poetry especially was bashful, especially in his Sunday school class, on account of his voice was changing and was more like a duck’s with a bad cold, than a boy’s, and was half man’s and half boy’s voice anyway.

“Come on! you guys!” Dragonfly yelled back to us from up ahead, and we all swished on.

It was quite a long run to the sycamore tree, but we got there quick, and found Circus and Big Jim looking inside the big long opening in its side for the letter or whatever it was we were supposed to find. In a jiffy Circus had it out and was waving it around in the air for us to see, and when we gathered around, we saw that it was an envelope with our names on it, only it was an actual honest-to-goodness letter with a postmark on it which, when I got close enough to see, I saw was Pass Lake, Minnesota.

Say, something in my heart went flippety-flop, and I just knew who the letter was from. For some reason I knew, _knew_ what was going to be inside. It was going to be a letter from the same great big fat man on whose property on Pass Lake we’d had our camp last summer, and he was inviting us to come up again for a week or two or maybe more.

Say, it certainly didn’t take us long to find out that I was right, which I knew I was.

“It’s from Santa Claus!” Dragonfly said, Santa Claus being the name we’d given to the man whom we’d all liked so well on our camping trip and whose wife had made such good blackberry pies.

Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah! We all read the letter, and felt so wonderful inside we wanted to yell and scream.

There was one paragraph in the letter that bothered us, though, and it was, “Be sure, of course, to get your parents’ consent, all of you, and be sure to bring along your fishing tackle. Fishing is good. Little Snow-in-the-face will be eager to see you all. He has been very sick this past week, and has been taken to the government hospital. Be sure to pray for him. His big brother, Eagle Eye, has a real Sunday school going here, but his mother and father are not yet believers on the Lord Jesus Christ, and that makes it hard for him. But Snow-in-the-face is a very brave little Christian.”

Right that second, we heard footsteps coming in our direction, and looking up I saw a dark brown smiling face, a row of shining white teeth with one all-gold tooth right in front, and I knew it was Barry Boyland, Old Man Paddler’s nephew, who had taken us to Pass Lake last year.

“Hi, gang!” he called to us, and we called back to him, “Hello, Barry.” And we all swarmed around him to tell him about the letter and to ask questions, all of us knowing that he was the one who had written the notes for us, just to make the last letter more mysterious and more of a surprise.

Well, it was time to go home, and try to convince our parents that we all needed a vacation very badly. For some reason I wasn’t sure my folks would say I could go.

3

“How’ll we do it?” I asked Poetry, as he and Dragonfly and I stopped at our gate to let Poetry and Dragonfly go on home, and to let me go on in.

“How’ll we do _what_?” Dragonfly wanted to know, and right away sneezed at something or other, probably at some of the flowers in Mom’s little flower bed around our mail box.

Dragonfly reached for and pulled out of his hip pocket his pop’s big red bandana handkerchief and grabbed his nose just in time to stop most of the next three sneezes, which came in one-two-three style as fast as a boy pounding a nail with a hammer.

“How’ll we convince our parents that we need a vacation?” Poetry said, and Dragonfly piped up and said, “People take vacations when they’re worn out from too much work.”

“Overworking?” I said, and Dragonfly sneezed again, and looked down at Mom’s very pretty happy-looking different-colored gladiolus in the half-moon flower bed around the mail box.

“If you don’t quit planting gladioluses around here, I can’t come over and play here anymore.”

“Or work, either,” Poetry said, and I said, “Well, you guys better beat it, I’ve got to overwork a little.” I opened our gate, squeezed through it and started on the run for our tool shed where I found a nice clean hoe which I’d cleaned myself the last time I’d used it, and in a few jiffies I was out in our garden hoeing potatoes as hard as I could, getting hotter and hotter and sweating like everything. Sweat was running off my face and I could feel it on my back, too. With a little wind blowing across from the woods and Sugar Creek I felt fine even in the hot sun. I certainly wasn’t getting tired as fast as I thought I would on account of when a boy sweats at hard work and the wind blows a little, he feels better than when he just kinda lazies around and tries to keep cool.

I wished Pop, who had gone somewhere for something, would hurry home and see me working hard. It was almost fun hoeing the potatoes, though it was kinda hard not to stop at the end of each row and pick and eat a few luscious blackberries which grew there. In fact, I did stop a few times, which is maybe why I got to the end of each row quicker.

Once I got thirsty, and went into the house for a drink of water, and Mom called out to the kitchen from the front room and said, “That you, Theodore?” which is Pop’s first name.

“Nope, it’s just me,” I said to Mom.

“Come on in a minute, Bill. Somebody wants to see you.”

“Who?” I said, wondering who it was and hoping it wasn’t anybody I didn’t know.

I peeked around the corner of the kitchen door and saw our lady Sunday school teacher. All of a sudden I felt good, although kinda bashful, on account of I was in my overalls and was probably very dusty and sweaty and maybe had my hair mussed up.

We said a few bashful words to each other, and she said, “I brought you that book of Indian stories,” and right away I was thinking of little “Snow-in-the-face” up North and wishing I could go up and see him again.

I thanked her for the book, and said, “Well--thanks, that’s swell--I mean, Thank you so very much,” which was what I thought Mom would want me to say in the way I said it.

“Don’t overwork,” she said to me with a smile in her voice, and I said “I will,” and was going out the kitchen door before I knew I’d said the wrong thing. She certainly was a good Sunday school teacher, and knew how to make a boy like her, and also want to come back to Sunday school every Sunday.

Just as I was about to let the door shut behind me quietly like I do when we have company, I heard the news on the radio in the front room, and I knew that maybe Mom and my teacher had been listening to the radio when I came in, and had turned it low for a jiffy. One of the things I heard was about a little St. Paul, Minnesota girl named Marie Ostberg having been kidnapped and a reward being offered by the father... Then I heard the announcer mention something that I thought was a wonderful idea and it was: “Duluth--the hayfever colony--will have thousands of new visitors this year, because the heavy rains throughout the nation have made it the worst for pollen in many years. Thousands will be going north...”

That would give us _two_ reasons why some of the gang ought to get to go--overwork and hayfever. Dragonfly had the hayfever, and if I worked awful hard, I might overwork, although it’d be easier to have hayfever if I could only get it.

Right that second, while I was picking up the hoe to go back to the potatoes again, I heard our car horn and Pop was at the gate, waiting for me to come and open it. Boy, was I ever glad I was hot and sweaty and that there were four or five long rows of potatoes already hoed which Pop could see himself.

“Hi,” I said to my reddish-brownish-mustached Pop. And he just lifted one of his big farmer hands and saluted me like I was an officer in the army and he only a private. I swung open the gate, and, seeing the gladiolus by the mail box, stopped and took three or four quick deep sniffs at them, just as Pop swung inside and stopped beside the big plum tree in the gravelled driveway.

Then I looked quick at the sun, to see if I could sneeze, and I actually did, three times in quick succession, just as Pop turned off the motor and heard me do it.

“I hope you aren’t going to catch cold,” Pop said, and looked at me suspiciously. “You boys go in swimming today?”

“The water was almost too hot,” I said. “I never felt better in my life, only----” Right that second, something in my nose tickled again and I sneezed and was glad of it. “Maybe I’m allergic to something down here....”

“Down _where_?” Pop said, and looked at me from under his heavy eyebrows, which I noticed weren’t up any more but were starting to drop a little in the middle, like he was wondering “What on earth?” and trying to figure me out, like I was a problem in arithmetic or something.

“I mean----” I started to answer him, and then decided maybe it was the wrong time to talk to Pop about what I wanted to talk to him about. So I said, “Well, I better get back to those potatoes. There are only two more rows.”

“_Back_ to them?” Pop said, astonished. “You mean----?” He slid out of our long green car and looked toward the garden, and even from where we were, you could see that somebody had been hoeing the potatoes. “Well, what do you know about _that_? That’s wonderful! That’s unusual! That’s astonishing,” which I knew was some of Pop’s friendly sarcasm which he was always using on me, and I sort of liked it on account of Pop and I were good friends as well as he being my pop and I his red-haired, freckled-faced overworked boy, who didn’t have hayfever yet but was trying to get it.

Right that second I sneezed again, and Pop looked at me and said, “What’s that grin on your face for?” and I said, “Is there a grin on my face?”

“There certainly is,” he said, and I sighed and wished I could sneeze again, which for some reason I did, without even trying to, or looking at the sun, or smelling the gladiolus or anything, and I got a quick hope that maybe I was actually going to get hayfever.

Pop banged the car door shut, after taking out a paper bag which had something in it he’d probably bought somewhere in town. Then he said, “You’ve maybe been working too hard and been sweating, and with the wind blowing, you need a dry shirt. Better come in the house and help your mother and Charlotte Ann and me eat this ice cream,” which I did, our Sunday school teacher helping also, she being the reason Pop had hurried to town to get the ice cream in the first place.

Then Mom told me to go gather the eggs, which I started to do, and ran ker-smack into something very interesting. I was up in our haymow looking for old Bentcomb’s nest for her daily egg, which was always there if she laid one, although sometimes she missed a day.

“Well, what do you know?” I said to myself when I climbed up over the alfalfa to her corner. Old Bentcomb was still on the nest and her pretty bent comb was hanging down over her left eye. She was sitting there like she owned the whole haymow and who was I to be intruding?

“Hi, Old Bentcomb!” I said, “How’re you this afternoon? Got your egg laid yet?”

She didn’t budge, but just squatted down lower with her wings all spread out covering the whole nest.

“Where’s your egg?” I said, and reached out my hand toward her, and “zip-zip-peck,” quick as lightning her sharp bill pecked me on the hand and wrist. She wouldn’t let me get near her without pecking at me, and when I tried to lift her off to see if she’d laid an egg today, she was mad as anything, and complained like she was being mistreated, and gave a saddish disgruntled string of cluck-cluck-clucks at me and at the whole world.

I let her stay and scooted down the ladder and ran ker-whizz to the house, stormed into our back door and said to Mom, “Hey, Mom, Old Bentcomb wants to ‘set’! What’ll we do--break her up or let her set?”

“For land’s sakes,” Mom said to me, “don’t knock the world off its hinges!--_What! Old Bentcomb!_”

“Actually!” I said, “--up in the haymow!”

“We’ll break her up,” Mom said. “We can’t have her hatching a nest of chickens up there.”

“Couldn’t we make her a nest down here, out by the grape arbor? Couldn’t we put her in the new coop Pop and I made?”

“Better break her up,” Mom said, “she’s one of our best laying hens and if we set her, she’ll be busy all summer raising her family, and not an egg will we get.”

“But we break her up every year, and she never has a family of her own,” I said. “I think she’d look awfully proud and pretty strutting around the barnyard with a whole flock of little white chickens following her,”--which is one of the prettiest sights a boy ever sees on a farm--a mother hen with a whole flock of fuzzy-wuzzy little chickens behind and beside and in front of her, and running quick whenever she clucks for them to come and they all gather around her and eat the different things which she finds for them, such as small bugs, pieces of barnyard food, small grains of this or that and just plain stuff.

“Well, maybe you’re right,” Mom said, all of a sudden, “let’s set her. First, let’s get her nest ready and select fifteen of the nicest leghorn eggs we can find and have them all ready for her; then you go get her and bring her down.”

“She won’t want to leave her nice warm nest up in the haymow,” I said to Mom, looking up at her kinda pretty, warmish summer face under its blue sunbonnet.

“No, she won’t,” Mom said back to me, “But she’ll do it if we work it right. Hens are very particular about moving from one nest to another. We’ll maybe have to shut her up in the coop.”

Well, it was one of the most interesting things I liked to do around the farm. First, we took a nice brand new chicken coop which was just about as high as halfway between my knees and my belt, then we scooped a foot-in-diameter roundish hole in the ground close to our grape arbor, making the hole about only a few inches deep. We lined it with nice clean straw and then selected fifteen of the prettiest, cleanest white eggs we could find which had been laid that very day by the different leghorn other hens on our farm, and which would probably be what were called “fertile eggs” and would hatch. Then I ran lickety-sizzle as fast as I could to our barn, scooted up the ladder into our haymow, and in spite of Old Bentcomb’s being very angry and not wanting to leave her nest, I got her under one arm and brought her down the ladder.

In less than a jiffy or two, I was with her up to where Mom and I were going to coop her up in the coop. I stooped down first and looked into the dark inside of the coop and there was the prettiest, nicest most beautiful fifteen eggs you ever saw all side by each. The coop had a roof on it but no floor, the floor being the ground with the straw nest in it. I pushed Bentcomb very gently and in a friendly way up to the hole in the front of the coop, and let her look in at the nest full of eggs. She had been clucking like everything and whining and complaining in a saddish sort of voice which meant she wanted to be a mother of a whole flock of little chickens, but say! She was mad at me and didn’t want to go in. She kept turning away from the hole in the coop not even looking at the nice new nest. So I said to her, “O.K., Old Bentcomb, I’ll take you out and show you what will happen to you if you _don’t_ sit on those eggs.”

I took her in my two hands, holding her tight so she wouldn’t squirm loose and get away, and walked with her to our chicken house and around behind it to where there was a peach tree under which we had a pen with chickenyard wire all around and on top. Inside were about nine or a dozen of our best laying hens who had wanted to set, but whom we decided to “break up” instead of letting them have their stubborn hen-ways and “set.” There they were, all shut up by themselves. Some of them were walking around with their wings all spread out, and clucking like they wanted a bunch of little chickens to come and crawl under them, and they were cluck-cluck-clucking in a saddish whining tone of voice. Over in one corner was a white egg which meant that one of the hens had already given up wanting to “set” and was behaving herself again like a good laying hen. And I thought that as soon as we could decide which one of the hens it was, we’d take her out and let her have her liberty again.

“See there,” I said to Bentcomb, “look at those lonesome old hens! They’re clucking around just like you’ve been doing. Every one of them wanted a family of her own, and not one of them is going to get it! If you don’t be good, and go in that coop like we want you to, we’ll have to shut you up in here and leave you for two whole weeks, which we do to all hens who want to ‘set’ and we won’t let ’em.”

Say, Bentcomb wasn’t interested at all. She absolutely refused to look, so I took her back again to the coop. “I’m going to give you one more chance,” I said. “I want you to go in there carefully, not breaking any of those eggs, and behave yourself.”

Once more I got down on my knees, holding her carefully like she was a very good friend, which she was, and so she could look in and see for herself what we wanted her to do.

Well sir, this time she must have decided to be good, ’cause all of a sudden, she quit struggling and looked in like she’d made up her mind it might be a good place for her to live for awhile. Without me doing any pushing, or anything, she very slowly started to creep inside the opening in the coop, toward the eggs. The next thing I knew she was on the nest, turning around and scooting herself down and spreading her wings out and settling down and covering every one of those fifteen eggs with her wings.

I turned and yelled, “MOM! She’s gone in! She’s going to set!”

“Put the board over the hole for a while,” Mom said, “so she can’t get out. Let her stay until she feels at home, and then she’ll go back every time we let her out for exercise and water and food.”

I put the rectangular shaped board over the door of Bentcomb’s house, and propped it shut with a brick, so she couldn’t get out.

And so we “set” my favorite hen, Old Bentcomb. In just three weeks there’d be a whole nestful of cheeping chicks and a very proud mamma hen. I sat down for a minute on the roof of her house to rest. I was almost overworked, I started to think, when Pop yelled, “Hey, Bill! Come on out! We’ve got to get the rest of the chores done!” So I started to the barn to help him do them, still thinking about the camping trip we’d all been invited to take, and wondering if I could get to go.