I forgot to tell you that my folks had gone to town, and they had told me I could go over to Poetry’s house that afternoon just as soon as I had finished hoeing a few rows of potatoes. Dad hadn’t said how many rows, so I asked him, and he said, “Let your conscience be your guide. But there are several that ought to be done.”
My conscience wasn’t sure how to be a guide to a boy that didn’t like to hoe potatoes. So I thought I ought to know exactly how many “several” was and maybe that would help. As soon as Dad and Mom and Charlotte Ann had gone, I looked up the word in our brand-new dictionary, and it said, “Indefinite: more than one or two, but not many.” The only thing was, I forgot and left the dictionary open right where I had been looking, and when Dad came home later, he found out what I had done and—but that’s getting ahead of the story.
Anyway, just to be sure I’d hoed several, I actually hoed three, which was more than one or two but wasn’t many.
Then I had left my hoe in the shade, leaning it up against one of the big pignut trees at the end of the garden, and had started down the dusty path toward the stile, over which I was going to climb and then hurry as fast as I could to Poetry’s house. That’s when I had run into the snake on that dry, sunny path.
Whenever Big Jim called a meeting and wanted it in a hurry, we all tried to get there as quick as we could. So when Poetry told me about the gang meeting, we decided to go right away.
“What kind of a snake is it?” Poetry asked.
I said, “I don’t know, but maybe Dad will know. He knows pretty near everything there is to know about snakes and birds and toads and fish and things.”
“My pop does too,” Poetry said.
And even though I knew that my dad knew more than Poetry’s dad any day, I didn’t say so.
We started to go back up the path toward the pignut trees and our garden. In a little while we’d be going past our house with its big green ivy that covers nearly all the south side—it had just a little open space upstairs where my bedroom window is—and also past another iron pitcher pump at the end of a board walk about twenty feet from our back door. Then we’d go on past the mailbox at the side of the road that says on it “Theodore Collins,” which is my dad’s name. And then we’d swish across that dusty gravel road and vault over a rail fence. Once in the woods, we’d start running, and quicker than a jackrabbit could do it, we’d be at the spring where the gang was going to meet.
Poetry, being as sure as I was that the snake was dead, did what lots of boys do to dead snakes. He picked it up by the tail and dragged it along behind him till we got to the pignut tree. Then he draped it over the rail fence at the edge of our garden, and we left it there till Dad should get home in the late afternoon. I was going to show it to him and ask him what kind of a snake a boy could scare to death with just his voice or by missing him with a big clod of dirt.
We stopped to look at the snake, hanging there with its head on one side and its tail on the other, and it really looked BIG—almost as long as Little Jim is tall. Little Jim was the littlest member of the Sugar Creek Gang, a super guy with brown curls on the top of his round head, and blue eyes, and a very serious face, though sometimes his face was mischievous.
All of a sudden Poetry looked at our garden and said, “You been hoeing potatoes this afternoon?”
“Sure,” I said, half proud of myself.
“It’s hard to believe,” Poetry said and ducked to get out of the way of my flying fist, which I wouldn’t have hit him hard with, since he was my almost best friend.
“Well, I’m surprised,” he said.
But it wasn’t funny, and I wouldn’t laugh.
Just that second there was a heavy, clumsy movement at my feet. Looking down, I saw a big, fat, friendly-looking garden toad, which I had almost stepped on and smashed.
“Hi, Warty,” I said down to him.
“Hi, who?” Poetry exclaimed.
“Warty,” I said, “Dad’s pet toad. He lives here in the garden and eats cutworms and mosquitoes and bugs and stuff. Last night Dad and I made a big supper for him.”
“Supper! For a toad!” Poetry looked down at Warty, who was sitting as quiet as an old setting hen on a nest, all widened out like a mother chicken covering a nest full of eggs.
“Sure,” I said and explained. “Dad hung a sheet over the fence right here, close to where Warty hangs out, and turned his big electric lantern on the sheet for fifteen minutes. And all kinds of bugs and night moths and things flew against it, and those that plopped down to the ground, Warty gobbled up. Look—he’s as fat as a stuffed toad today”—which Warty was. I’d never seen him so fat.
When I was littler, Pop had taught me to be very glad if we had a toad living in our garden, because toads are the farmer’s friends. “A toad will eat over ten thousand injurious insects in one summer,” he had told me.
“Let’s see you throw your voice at him and kill him,” Poetry said.
But I wouldn’t. Besides, I thought Poetry was just making fun of me.
So he decided to try it himself, which he did, yelling down at Warty in his half-man-half-boy’s voice, which is the kind of voice he had, he being at the age in his life when a boy is part boy and part man, like a tadpole about to turn into a frog.
But Warty, who had dived halfway under a rhubarb leaf, just blinked his lazy-looking eyes at us or at nothing and didn’t move a muscle.
Well, we had to hurry on. Just as we reached our henhouse, I turned around to take a final look at the big fierce-looking snake hanging on the garden fence, and it wasn’t there!
Poetry looked at the same time and said, “Your dead snake doesn’t like hanging on a fence in the hot sun for people to look at, or else he lost his balance and fell off”—which was probably right, I thought.
Anyway, when Dad came home, I could remember where the snake had been hanging, and it’d be as easy as falling off a rail fence to find it lying there in the weeds.
“What’s that song you’re whistling?” Poetry asked me all of a sudden.
“What song?” I listened to my thoughts, and, sure enough, I had been whistling a song and didn’t know it. In a second I remembered what it was. It was one of the hymns we sometimes sing in the Sugar Creek church on Sunday mornings, when Mom and Dad and Charlotte Ann and I are all sitting together in a row. I could hardly believe my astonished thoughts when I realized that it was a song called “A Mighty Fortress,” which I remembered was written by a man who, our minister said, was a converted priest named Martin Luther. The place in the song that I had been whistling was where it tells about Satan, and the words were “One little word shall fell him.”
I didn’t understand it very well, but I could sort of feel that it was the Savior of the world whose word was strong enough to hit the Devil and knock the living daylights out of him—even if He threw at him only one little word.
Anyway, I felt kind of good inside for some reason.
But it was time to get going to the gang meeting.
“I wonder what Big Jim wants a meeting for?” I asked Poetry, as we decided to run to make up the lost time.
Boy oh boy, if I had known what that gang meeting was going to be about, and also what was going to happen to us before the things we had planned at that meeting were finally all finished, I’d really have been excited.
If I had known that, later that year, when summer was over and winter came and there was a lot of snow everywhere, the gang would have to make a very important trip up into the hills to the old haunted house I told you about in the last story of the Sugar Creek Gang—if I had only known …
But I didn’t, so Poetry and I weren’t even excited as we hurried on to the spring where we were to meet the gang.
I can hardly wait till I write that far in the story before telling you about that terribly exciting experience. If we hadn’t had Big Jim’s rifle along with us, every one of us might have died.