The Sugar Creek Gang Digs for TreasureHutchens, Paul
General
The Sugar Creek Gang Digs for Treasure
Hutchens, Paul
Adventure and adventurers -- Juvenile fiction; Christian life -- Juvenile fiction; Treasure troves -- Juvenile fiction
We circled back to Dragonfly and Circus, where we all lay down on some
tall grass behind a row of shrubbery, which somebody years ago had
set out there, when maybe a family of people had lived there. It had
probably been someone’s summer cabin, I thought--somebody who lived in
St. Paul or Minneapolis, or somewhere, and had built the cabin up here.
I noticed that there was a cement pavement running all around the back
side of the cabin, which was set up against the almost cliff-like hill.
Also there was a very long stone stairway beginning about twenty feet
from the old spider-web-covered door and running around the edge of the
ravine, making a sort of semi-circle down to the lake to where there
was a very old dock, which the waves of the lake in stormy weather, or
else the ice in the winter, had broken down, and nobody had fixed it.
We waited in our hiding place for maybe about ten minutes, listening
and watching before we decided nobody was inside, and before we decided
to look in the windows and later go inside, ourselves. We didn’t think
about it being trespassing, on account of there was an old abandoned
house back at Sugar Creek which our gang always went into anytime we
wanted to, and nobody thought anything about it, because that old cabin
back home belonged to a very old long-whiskered old man whom everybody
knows as Old Man Paddler, and anything that belonged to him seemed to
belong to us, too, he being a very special friend of anybody who was
lucky enough to be a boy.
Anyway, we, all of us, were pretty soon peeking in through the windows,
trying to see what we could see, but it was pretty dark inside, so we
knew if we wanted to see more we had to find some way to get in.
Right that second I decided to see if my Man Friday was my Man Friday
or not, so I said, “O.K., Friday, go up and knock at that door.”
Say, Dragonfly got the scaredest look on his face. As you maybe know,
if you’ve read some of the other Sugar Creek Gang stories, Dragonfly’s
mother believed in ghosts, and good luck happening to you if you find
a four-leaf clover or a horseshoe, so Dragonfly believed it too, most
boys believing and doing what their parents believe and do.
Dragonfly not only had a scared look on his face but also a stubborn
one, when he said, “I _won’t_!”
He refused to budge an inch, and so in a very fierce voice I commanded
Poetry and Circus, “O.K., cannibals, eat him up!”
“They’re NOT cannibals!” Dragonfly whined. “They’re goats, and goats
only eat tin cans and shirts and ivies and things like that!”
“What’s the difference?” the fat goat said, and started head-first for
Dragonfly.
But we couldn’t afford to waste any time that way, so Poetry, being
maybe the bravest one of us, went up to the door, while we held our
breath, I knowing that there wasn’t anybody inside but wondering if
there was, and if there was, who was it, and was he dangerous, and
what would happen if there was a fierce man in there or something.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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