Sugar Creek

“ If it had been winter and Sugar Creek frozen over, I could have leaped out of the boat and raced across the ice to the other side, but there isn’t a boy in the world who can run or walk on the water in the summertime. There was only one way for me to escape that fierce-faced woman, who in another few jiffies would be down that incline herself and into the boat and have me in her clutches. ”

“ When I woke up we were still flying along with Barry at the wheel, and most of us sitting in lying-down positions, getting a swell afternoon nap. It was wonderful to ride along that fast, and also wonderful to see all the things we saw, as the road wound itself around and around like the winding barefoot-boy paths through the Sugar Creek woods along Sugar Creek itself. At the town of Pass Lake, most of us got out, stretched ourselves and bought postcards at a drug store and sent them to our folks. ”

“ We spent maybe an hour walking around through the woods to see how many trees had been blown down or uprooted, and some of our favorite trees had, which made us feel kinda sad, but it was good to be together even though we couldn’t go in swimming on account of Sugar Creek’s ordinarily nice, clear, friendly water was an angry-looking brown and was running almost as fast all along its course as it does all the time92 just in the riffles. ”

“ To get to the swamp at the quickest possible moment was the first and most important thing in the world.
We stumbled our excited, rain-blinded way toward the Sugar Creek bridge where our path crossed the north road. I led the way myself, being careful to keep out in the open so we wouldn’t run the risk of getting struck by falling trees or branches—also staying away from the tallest trees and especially the tall oak trees, which are the kind of trees lightning strikes more than any other kind. ”

“ Little Tom Till answered. “She’s a he. He’s been hiding out in the tent pretending to be a woman, wearing women’s clothes and earrings and hats and using fancy perfumes and stuff.”
Every second the fast current was swirling us downstream closer and closer to an overhanging elm, one that had fallen into the water from the last Sugar Creek storm, and its top extended almost all the way across the channel from the north shore to the island. I could see our boat was going to crash into the leafy branches and we’d be stopped. ”

“ I was trembling inside like any fisherman trembles when a fierce fast-fighting fish gets away after it’s been hooked—only this one hadn’t been hooked with a real hook. He had probably come swimming along down there under the water, looking for an early supper, like a robin hops around in our lawn at Sugar Creek looking for night crawlers, and, seeing Wally swimming lazily around, had decided to eat him, which is what some big fish do to little other fish when they’re hungry. ”

“ Poetry’s faster-thinking mind cried to me. “Let’s beat it!” He showed me what he wanted us to do, by scrambling to his awkward feet and making a dive east toward the place where I knew we could get through a board fence, on the other side of which was a path that wound through a forest of giant ragweeds leading to Dragonfly’s Pop’s cornfield in the direction of the Sugar Creek Gang’s swimming hole. ”

“ Poetry said, and started on, but I stopped him, and said, “Maybe it’s a loon.”
“It’s coming from out there in the trees,” he said. “Loons don’t stay up here in the woods. They’re out on the lake or else right close to it all the time.”
We both listened, my heart thumping like Pop’s hammer driving a terribly big nail into a log in our barn at Sugar Creek. It was a worse scare than I’d had in a long time. It certainly sounded exactly like what we’d heard at the boathouse. ”

“ Then, all of a disappointing sudden, the brown whatever-it-was disappeared into the shadow of the elderberry bushes, and I heard an exciting whirring noise in the lane on the other side of the fence. A fast jiffy later, an automobile came to noisy-motored life, a pair of head-lamps went on, and an oldish-sounding car went rattling down the lane, headed in the direction of the Sugar Creek school, which is at the end of the lane where it meets the county line road. ”

“ The old icehouse was also about the same shape as the woodshed beside our red-brick schoolhouse back at Sugar Creek, where we had had many a gang meeting. I noticed that the only light that came in was from the door which, as I told you, was boarded up to as high as my chin, although there was a smallish crack between two logs on the side next to the lake.
It only took a jiffy for our eyes to get accustomed to the darkness. I looked around but couldn’t see anything but sawdust. ”

“ Over the north-road fence, across the road, up the incline, around the end post of another fence and along the creek we ran. I didn’t even notice the different kinds of bushes and wild flowers that bordered the path like I generally do, such as the purple vervain and skullcap and the red-flowered bee comb, which honeybees and butterflies and especially humming birds like so well—red being the favorite color of all the humming-birds that live around Sugar Creek. ”

“ I wondered, and felt an angry feeling inside of me, 'cause if there was anything the boys of the Sugar Creek Gang didn't do, [Pg 58] it was we didn't go into anybody's barn and catch pigeons without the farmer asking us to, or without us first asking the farmer if we could.
Right that minute, while Little Jim was stroking Mixy, and I had my hand and one foot on the ladder ready to start up, I heard Pop's voice calling from somewhere up in the haymow, and saying to us. "Bill! Are you down there?"
"Yeah," I yelled back up to him, "Little Jim and I are both here. We're coming up!" ”

“ 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,20 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. ”

“ Naturally, there wasn’t anything extra mysterious about a woman wearing overalls around Sugar Creek, especially when she was doing the kind of hard work which men have to do and which some women have to do sometimes, but what would a woman be doing digging in an abandoned cemetery late at night? “What on earth?” I thought and said so.
Not a one of us knew what to do or say next so we decided to go over to the old maple tree. The minute we got there Poetry ordered me to shine my light around the tree trunk while he studied the bark to see if any of it had been freshly knocked off. ”

“ There certainly can be no discount on the fertility of the soil. One branch of Sugar Creek takes its rise in this township. There are numerous branches of this stream from the center, east and northeast. They unite in one and leave on the south side near the center of Section 33. There is also a small stream flowing northwest from the northern part, and one on the west rises near the railroad, and flows in a zigzag course to near the northwest corner. The Indianapolis, Bloomington & Western Railroad enters the township one-fourth mile west of the southeast corner of Section 35. ”

“ Poetry went in the house and got his binoculars and we all climbed up on their chicken house which didn't have any snow on its roof, and started to look around Sugar Creek at different things. Little Jim grinned when he noticed there wasn't any [Pg 63] snow on the roof of the chicken house, and said, "That certainly was a good sermon this morning," then he grunted and sat down astride the chicken house roof, right close to a little tin chimney out of which white smoke was coming, there being a kerosene heater inside the chicken house. ”

“ Don't they know they're dead?"
I looked at the tree Little Jim was looking at, and it was the first time I'd noticed that the beech tree still had nearly every one of its leaves on it. They were very brown, even browner than some of the maple and walnut tree leaves had been, when they'd all fallen off last fall.
"How could they know they're dead, if they are dead?" Poetry said, and just that second I heard Circus and Dragonfly coming up from the direction of the bayou, which was down pretty close to Sugar Creek itself.... ”

“ Perhaps it was the sight of the Wabash River which suggested washing clothes to Grandma Padgett. She said they were now near the Illinois State line, and she would not like to reach the place with everything dirty. There was always plenty to do when a body first got home, without hurrying up wash-day.
So when they passed a small place called Macksville, and came to Sugar Creek, she called a halt, and they spent the day in the woods. Sugar Creek, though not sweet, was clear. Zene carried pails full of it to fill the great copper kettle, and slung this over a fire. ”

“ I tucked the two balloons in my shirt pocket beside my New Testament and buttoned the flap, and forgot about them, until the next day when we were on a very special fishing trip for walleyed pike.
Boy oh boy, it was going to be a wonderful trip, I thought, and we were going to fish, not for small fish like blue gills and crappies, which people call “pan” fish, but44 for big walleyes, to pack and ship home to our folks at Sugar Creek. Also, we were going to keep our eyes open every second to see if we could find any trace of John Till. ”

“ Say, you can imagine how we felt. I could just see in my mind’s eye Little Jim’s gunny sack stuffed with money and all of us coming grinning happily back into camp, with Big Jim and Little Tom Till and maybe Barry Boyland, looking at us with84 astonished eyes. Also I could imagine what “The Sugar Creek Times” would print about us, and also how happy the Ostberg girl’s daddy would be, so I said, “O.K., Friday, give me the spade.”
“Me dig,” Dragonfly said, “—me white man’s slave.” With that he scrambled across to where Poetry was ”

“ We should have known anybody wouldn’t be dumb enough to leave a map right out in plain sight for anybody to find, if it showed where to dig for any buried treasure!”
There certainly wasn’t anything unusual about digging up fish86 in an icehouse anyway. We’d buried some in the icehouse at our camp last year when we’d been up here, and then, a week later, when we’d been ready to go home we’d dug them up and packed them with sawdust and ice in a keg and taken them back to Sugar Creek. ”

“ Its principal mountains, Walker's, Sugar Run, Angel's Rest, Wolf Creek, East River, Peters' and Salt Pond, which are high, rugged, and precipitous. The streams are rapid, and the surface of the country, other than the river and creek bottoms, generally rough and broken, but the soil rich and fertile. The population in 1861 was made up of sturdy, liberty-loving, hardy mountaineers, engaged chiefly in agricultural pursuits, where brave men are bred, accustomed to the chase and the use of firearms, which fitted them for the hardships and privations of soldier life. ”

“ Distinguished by the beautiful groves of maple that adorn its crest, Sugar Hill is destined to grow more and more in the popular esteem. No traveller should pass it by. It is so admirably placed as to command in one magnificent sweep of the eye all the highest mountains; it is also lifted into sun and air by an elevation sufficiently high to reach the cooler upper currents. The days are not so breathless or so stifling as they are down in the valley. You look deep into the Franconia Notch, and watch the evening shadows creep up the great east wall. ”

“ Across the river were the well-wooded hills of Sugar Island, with here and there a settler's shanty and clearing. To the left hand could still be seen the broad river winding its course down toward Lake George, the smaller stream, called Garden River, joining it a short distance below. Then behind, the scene was equally, if not more grand—high rocky hills scantily clad with fir and birch-trees. We felt that we were now indeed in the land of the Indian, far away from civilization; no railways, no telegraphs, no omnibuses or street cars, no hotels or shops for many hundred miles. ”

“ And to this purpose they bound themselves that night by a solemn and legal compact.
Many circumstances lent themselves to so original a determination. The locality was healthful, picturesque, and fertile. Sycamore Creek, a considerable tributary of the Sacramento, furnished them a generous water supply at all seasons; its banks were well wooded and interspersed with undulating meadow land. Its distance from stage-coach communication—nine miles—could easily be abridged by a wagon road over a practically level country. Indeed, all the conditions for a thriving settlement were already there. ”

“ The hump-backed ridges, connecting Cannon with Kinsman, present nearly the same appearance from this as from the other side of the Notch—or as remarked when approaching from Campton.
The superb picture seen from the upper end of the valley, combining, as it does, the two great chains in a single glance of the eye, is extended and improved by going a mile out of the village to the school-house on the Sugar Hill road. It is a peerless landscape. ”

“ To tell the truth, the journey from Jasper to the top of Sugar Mountain was not a pleasant one even in the best of weather, and now, with the wind pushing before it a bitterly cold mist, its disagreeableness was irritating. And it was not by any means a short journey. Big Corn Valley was fifteen miles across as the crow flies, and the meanderings of the road added five more. Then there was the barrier of the foothills, and finally Sugar Mountain itself, which when [46] the weather was clear lifted itself above all the other mountains of that region. ”