The Sugar Creek Gang Digs for Treasure — John Shaqi
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
I took another quick look at the little moving mountains on the lake
and pretty soon we were all inside where Circus had been all the time
looking around to see what he could find. But it was too dark to see
anything very clearly, and we didn’t have any flashlight. I looked on a
high mantel above the fireplace to see if there was any kerosene lamp,
but there wasn’t. There wasn’t any furniture in the main room except
a table, three small chairs and one great big old-fashioned Morris
chair like one my pop always sat in at home in our living room. It had
a fierce-looking tiger head with a wide-open mouth on the end of each
arm, which gave me an eery feeling when I saw them, which I did right
away, when Circus lit one of the matches he had with him.
“Here’s a candle, out here on the kitchen table,” Dragonfly said, and
brought it in to where we were. It certainly was the darkest cabin on
the inside I ever saw. The walls were almost black, and the stone arch
at the top of the fireplace was black with smoke where the fireplace
had probably smoked when it had a fire in it. There was only about an
inch of the candle left.
Circus lit it while Poetry held it, and we followed Poetry all around
wherever he went. The noise of the storm and the dark cabin made it
seem like we were having a strange adventure in the middle of the night.
There were spider webs on nearly everything, and dust on the floor,
and it looked like nobody had lived here for an awful long time, maybe
years and years. Besides the front porch there were just the three
rooms--the kitchen with the sink and pitcher pump, the main room with
the fireplace and a smallish bedroom which had a curtain hanging
between it and the main room. In the bedroom was a rollaway bed all
folded up and rolled against a wall.
Even though the broken twig trail had led us here, still we couldn’t
find a thing that looked like anything the ransom money might have been
hidden in.
So since the rain was still pouring down, we decided to call a meeting
and talk things over. We pulled the three stiff-backed chairs up to the
table in the center of the main room, and also the big chair, which I
turned sidewise, and I sat on one of the wooden arms. Poetry set the
short flickering candle in a saucer in the center of the table, and
I, being supposed to be the leader, called the meeting to order, just
like Big Jim does when the gang is all present. It felt good to be
the leader, even though I knew I wasn’t--and Poetry would have made a
better one.
We talked all at once, and also one at a time part of the time, and not
one of us had any good ideas as to what to do, except when the storm
was over to follow our trail of broken twigs back to where the girl had
been found and from there to the road and back to camp.
I looked at Poetry’s fat face and at Dragonfly’s large eyes and his
crooked nose and at Circus’s monkey-looking face, and we all looked at
each other.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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