Shenanigans at Sugar Creek Part 10

It was as quiet, in fact ten times as quiet, as if we were having school.

A jiffy later, I heard Mr. Black clear his throat and say to us, "It's been a very exciting afternoon, boys, and I don't feel any too well. I think I ran too hard to catch Prince." He took a very deep breath, and sighed, and yawned and leaned back in his chair, without looking straight at us but just in our direction, just as Little Jim piped up and said, "Did you catch him? Was he hurt?"

"Circus stopped him," Mr. Black said, "and we put him up in their barn till he calms down and quits trembling.... You boys want to bring in a couple of armloads of wood?"

Well, in a few jiffies all of us boys were carrying in wood and stacking it in the back of the schoolroom where we would have plenty to keep the schoolhouse nice and warm tomorrow.

I just couldn't figure it out--our not getting any licking, and Mr.

Black reading the Bible and all of a sudden acting very kind. Why, when we carried in our loads of wood, he acted like he was our very best friend, and that we not only hadn't done anything wrong, but that he didn't even _think_ we had. I couldn't understand it, but all the time Little Jim had a happy grin on his face, while we worked, and he kept saying, "I thought it would work.... I was pretty sure it would, and it did."

"_What_ worked!" I said to him, just as he opened the door for me and I went in with an armload of wood, and he shut the door after me.

Dragonfly and Poetry were out in the woodshed getting another load.

"Oh, something," Little Jim said, and wouldn't tell me, but he certainly had a cheerful expression on his face.

Pretty soon when we were all done and were getting ready to go home, Mr. Black stopped us and said, "Wait a minute, boys, I need one more picture.... You know, next Wednesday night Mrs. Mansfield is going to give a book review of _The Hoosier Schoolmaster_ at the Literary Society and I've promised to ill.u.s.trate the story on the screen with some modern pictures from real life. I ought to have one of a teacher putting a board on the chimney of a schoolhouse.... Leslie, you get that ladder I saw you boys carry behind the schoolhouse awhile ago, and set it up again--here, Bill, hold my Bible a minute." He thrust the beautiful new brown-bound Bible in my hands and started around the schoolhouse with Poetry to where we'd buried the ladder.

"What on _earth_!" I thought, and decided he must have looked toward the schoolhouse once and seen us putting it there, while he was down the road between the schoolhouse and Circus's house.

Without hardly knowing I was going to, I quick opened the Bible to the first blank page and what I saw was, "To my dear son, Sam Black, from your Mother." And right below it were printed, very carefully, the words:

"_This Book will keep you from sin,

or

Sin will keep you from this Book._"

In a jiffy the ladder was set up, with Little Jim and me holding it, and Mr. Black on his way up. Poetry who knew how to take pictures better than any of the rest of us was standing away out away from the schoolhouse, and snapped the picture, himself.

While Mr. Black was still up on the roof, he called down to all of us in a cheerful voice and said, "That was a very clever poem you boys composed--you know, the one you had on the snow man yesterday, and on the blackboard this afternoon. I think I got a very good picture of both of them for next Wednesday night--the people of Sugar Creek will think it very clever. When I first got the idea of ill.u.s.trating the book review for Mrs. Mansfield, I didn't know how much cooperation you boys were going to give me."

Things still didn't make sense--I couldn't understand it.

On the way home, though, with Poetry and me carrying Pop's new light ladder and with Little Jim carrying our swing board, all of a sudden Dragonfly let out a yell and made a dive for something shining in the road, swooped down on it and picked it up, and exclaimed, "_Good luck!_ No wonder we had good luck! here's a brand new horseshoe! No wonder we didn't get a lickin' from Mr. Black."

And it was! I knew it must have come off Prince when he was running down this very same road about an hour ago with half a gate swinging on his bridle rein.

Dragonfly hung the new horseshoe on his arm and said excitedly, "Will my mother ever be tickled! She'll hang it above our kitchen door.

We've got three there now I found _last_ year, and this is my first one _this year_. Boy oh boy, it's going to be a lucky year for the Sugar Creek Gang!"

Little Jim who had been shuffling along, ahead of the rest of us, with the swing board under one arm and with his stick in his other hand, stopped all of a sudden and looked back over our heads toward where the sun had just gone behind a cloud in the southwest, and he had a far-away expression in his eyes. He didn't pay any attention to what Dragonfly had said, but dropped back beside me and said, "That certainly was a swell sermon yesterday. I knew maybe Sylvia's pop was going to preach about that, and sure enough he did."

"About _what_?" I asked him, Little Jim being the only one of the gang that it was easy to talk about sermons with, except maybe Poetry.

Little Jim socked at a brown mullein stalk with his stick, and scattered brown seeds in different directions, then he answered me with his back still turned, "Oh, about when you get Jesus in your heart, you don't get mad so easy, and when you do, you behave yourself anyway--just like a fire in a house melts the snow off the roof, or like when spring comes, the new leaves will push all of the old dead leaves off that've hung on all winter."

Just that second Poetry who had the other end of the ladder, yelled back to me and said, "Quit walking so jerkily, Bill Collins!"

Then I remembered that our teacher had been in church that morning, and of course he had heard the part of the sermon I hadn't heard, on account of I had been thinking about Poetry's pet lamb and Snow-white, our white pigeon.

Then Little Jim said, "When I put that question in 'The Minister's Question Box,' just inside the church door this morning, I hoped Sylvia's pop would answer it in his very first sermon, and he did."

So that was it! It was as plain as day to me now. Dragonfly spoke up then and said, "Was that what you were thinking about yesterday afternoon, when you were looking up in the beech tree at the bottom of b.u.mblebee hill, and when you kept talking about snow on people's houses?" and that was the first time I even guessed that that little spindle-legged guy knew what we were talking about.

"Sure," Little Jim said.

Dragonfly tossed his new horseshoe up in the air and caught it when it came down, and said, "It's a pretty horseshoe, anyway--besides, I bet the gang _does_ have a lucky year, don't you?"

Little Jim whispered to me something that was a real secret, and it made me like him awful well, to know he wasn't afraid to talk to me about it, and it was, "Do you suppose Mr. Black _really_ became a Christian this morning while Sylvia's pop was preaching--or maybe he is just _going_ to let Jesus into his heart, real soon?"

"I don't know," I said.

Poetry who didn't know what we were all talking about, on account of he was up at the other end of the kinda longish ladder, said back to us, "We shouldn't have carried this ladder home. We should have made Shorty Long and Bob Till do it. They took it there, in the first place!"

And Little Jim piped up and said, "Are you _sure_? Maybe Mr. Black did it, so he could get a picture of it for next Wednesday night."

Dragonfly heard that and said, "But who piled the chairs up on his desk and knocked the Christmas tree over and everything?"

"Yeah, that's right," Little Jim said, "I guess maybe they did do it, but I'm not very mad at 'em."

"I'm not either," I said, "not _very_ much, anyway," and I wasn't,--only I knew that as long as they lived in the neighborhood we could expect most anything to happen.

Then Little Jim said to all of us. "As soon as the new cold wave is over, I'll bet it'll start to get warm, and pretty soon spring'll be here, and all the beech switches all along Sugar Creek will have new green leaves on 'em."

Then Little Jim whisked on ahead of us, every now and then stopping to make rabbit tracks in the snow with his pretty striped ash stick.

Boy oh boy, I wished it was already spring, 'cause when spring came we could all go barefoot again and as soon as Sugar Creek's face was thawed out, we'd go swimming in the old swimming hole and maybe have some very exciting brand new adventures, like we always do every spring and summer. The first thing I wanted to do when spring came, was to go fishing.

I was thinking what fun it'd be when spring came, when all of a sudden, I heard a roaring sound coming from the direction of Dragonfly's pop's woods, like a terrible wind was beginning to blow through the bare trees. I looked up quick, and noticed that the sky in that direction was darkish looking and kinda brownish, like there was a lot of dust blowing in from some far-away prairie. Then I felt a gust of cold wind hit me hard in the face.

In almost a half a jiffy all of us were in a whirling snowstorm, and I knew the new cold wave had already come, and that before spring got to Sugar Creek we'd have a lot more winter--in fact there might even be a blizzard.

"Hurry up!" all of us yelled to all of us. "We've got to get home quick."

But that's the beginning of another Sugar Creek Gang story, which I hope I'll get a chance to write for you real soon.

THE END