I forgot that I was up earlier than Mom herself and even Dad himself. Certainly I was up before Charlotte Ann was supposed to be. So when I heard the screen door slam behind me as I dashed out past our iron pitcher pump, I realized that the loud noise the door had made would probably wake up Charlotte Ann. And once she waked up in the morning, that was the end of it for any sleep any of the rest of the family wanted to get.
But it was too late now to go back to shut the door “like a gentleman,” as my parents tell me is the way to do it, so I ran on till I came to within about ten feet of the rail fence. Not knowing what to expect, I crept forward quietly till I got to where I could see my fishing pole.
The first thing I noticed was that the reel was nearly all unwound, so I figured Warty must have done quite a lot of traveling. I peeked through the fence, let my eyes run down the length of the line, which had threaded its way around through the potatoes and corn and beans and cabbage plants. Away over at the other side of the garden, not far from the pignut trees, it disappeared in the tall weeds.
What would Warty be doing out there in the weeds? I wondered. It wasn’t hot enough for him to be looking for shade, because the sun wasn’t even up yet, it was so early.
After climbing over the fence, I followed the trail of the line until I came to where it disappeared. I wondered if Warty had got tangled up in the weeds or what. And then, all of a sudden, in a little open space in the weeds, I saw something that made me stop stock-still and stare. I saw a great big hognose snake fastened onto my line instead of Warty. In fact, the line was right in his mouth! What on earth! I thought.
And then, all of a sickening sudden, I knew what had happened. I knew, because I saw a pair of toad’s legs sticking out of the snake’s mouth. The legs were kicking, making the snake look as if he had two big live horns on his head. That fierce-looking hognose had swallowed my friend Warty headfirst, all the way down to his legs!
I must have gotten there more quietly than I thought, because the snake didn’t even seem to realize I was watching him. He kept struggling and struggling with Warty, his head and neck puffed out much farther than they had been the day I’d first seen him and he had been hissing at me.
Warty still hadn’t given up, or those two legs wouldn’t have been kicking and squirming, and I knew he was trying to back out. The snake’s mouth kept working and working. It seemed he was trying to pull Warty in, as if his body was a gunnysack and he was working the end of the sack up around Warty’s fat sides.
I was so surprised and also so horrified at what I knew was happening—realizing that maybe I was to blame for tying Warty up so that he couldn’t get away—that it was like I was paralyzed. I couldn’t even scream for Dad to come to see if he could still save Warty.
And then, the next thing I knew, there was a sort of walking movement in the snake’s neck, and Warty’s two legs disappeared. And down below the snake’s head, I saw a big bulge, which meant that our friendly garden toad was completely swallowed.
Well, I knew there wasn’t any use getting hold of my fishing line and trying to pull Warty out. Middle-sized Jim had told me that snakes’ teeth are slanted back into their mouths and throats, and I could never pull Warty out.
And then, I got an idea. If Warty wasn’t dead yet, and if his tough toad skin had only been scratched by the snake’s sharp teeth, he might still be alive. And that idea quick brought me to life.
If you have read some of the other Sugar Creek Gang stories, you know that I had already made up my mind I was going to be a doctor someday and give people medicine to make them well. I would also operate on people. As quick as I got my idea, I raced across the garden, vaulted over the fence, and made a wild dive for the toolhouse, where we kept our hoes and spades.
I was going to quick grab up a hoe and race madly back to the garden, which Warty out of his kind heart had been looking after for us. I was going to get to Warty before old Hognose had a chance to start digesting him, slice the snake in two right close to the place where Warty was, and see if I could get Warty out, still alive. I would use the hoe to chop the snake in two and my Scout knife to do any other operating on him I had to do to get Warty out.
Just as I came out of the toolshed with the hoe, Dad came out of our house’s back door, saw me, and exclaimed with irony in his voice, “Well, what do you know!” He must have been astonished. He also must have felt mischievous, because he said to me, “Of all things! Bill Collins has gotten ambitious!”—which is a word to describe people who think of doing things without being told to and who also maybe like to work.
But I couldn’t be bothered with anything funny. “Quick!” I yelled to him. “Follow me and help me save Warty’s life! He’s gotten himself swallowed by a snake!”
A lot of our chickens must have thought that so much noisy excitement close to the house meant something for them to eat. A whole flock of maybe forty hens came rushing toward us, half running and half flying, the way they sometimes do when Mom comes out the kitchen door with a panful of something she’s going to toss out to them.
Anyway, when I quick headed back to the garden, yelling for Dad to follow me, I stumbled over a couple of excited hens, one of them being old Bent Comb, who lays her eggs in the haymow. Those two hens and the rest of the chickens went scattering in every main direction there is and also in all the other little directions there are in between, making a noisy scared path for me to run through on my way back to Warty.
“Hurry up!” I yelled back to Dad over my shoulder. At the garden, I vaulted over the fence and swished through the dusty garden as quick as I could without stepping on any corn or cabbages.
When I got there, I found out that my dad had not only followed me, but he had also used his head and had stopped at Mom’s clothesline and brought with him the forked stick that we used as a clothesline prop. In less time than I can write it for you, Dad and I went into action.
Maybe I’d better tell you that one time the year before, Dad and our doctor had let me watch a boy having his appendix cut out. So even while I was scared and excited and worried about Warty, I imagined myself to be a doctor, and I gave quick orders to Dad like a doctor giving them to his nurse.
I was holding onto my fishing line so that old Hognose couldn’t get away. “Quick!” I said. “Get that forked clothesline prop down on his neck! Pin him to the ground! There—just above the bulge Warty makes!”
And Dad did.
But that snake’s head being pinned to the ground made the tail and the rest of his ugly heavy body come to the most excited life you ever saw. It seemed he was trying to twist himself into and out of a million twists and wiggles and knots.
I don’t know how I ever did what I did, but I did—and I certainly wasn’t smart enough to think that fast either—but suddenly I was standing on the body of the snake with my right foot and was ready to begin my first surgical operation.
“Hey,” Dad said, trying to be mischievous at a very serious time. “You can’t perform an operation without first giving the patient an anesthetic” (which any boy knows is a medicine a doctor uses on a patient before he operates, so as to kill the pain).
I didn’t pay any attention to Dad’s half-funny remark. I had my official Scout knife out of my pocket and was opening its sharp cutting blade.
“Aren’t you going to kill the pain first?” Pop asked, still with a mischievous grin in his voice.
“I’m going to kill the snake,” I said.
With my left hand, I grabbed the snake’s heavy body halfway between my foot and Warty’s bulge and started to operate just as Dad said, “All good doctors wash their hands with soap before they perform an operation.”
I couldn’t be bothered. All I could think of was my friend Warty inside that bulge, where he couldn’t get a breath of fresh air. So I said, “This good doctor will wash his hands after the operation.”
“Your mother will see to that,” my dad remarked.
I was down on my left knee in the garden dirt, my right foot still on the snake’s body.
“Never mind making a fancy incision,” Pop said. “Just cut him in two and let Warty hop out by himself.”
Well, the rest of the operation isn’t very pleasant to write about, so I won’t write about it. Besides, it was too sad.
“Poor Warty,” Dad said after it was all over and Warty lay motionless on the ground. It looked as if he was completely dead. I looked down at him and felt my eyes stinging. I knew that if I had been a little younger, I’d maybe have cried.
“It’s all my fault,” I said, feeling very sad. “If I hadn’t tied him up, he could have gotten away.”
“Maybe not,” Dad said. “Snakes like that live on toads and frogs—toads especially—and they know how to catch them without help.”
I cut my line off, and Dad dug a hole in the corner of the garden for Warty’s grave, and there we buried him.
We dug another grave for the snake and covered them both up.
Dad and I were getting to be better and better friends, I thought, as we carried the hoe back toward the toolshed. He was not only my great big dad, who was my mom’s husband, but he was a pretty nice person also, even if he was a father.
Just then Mom opened the back door of our house and stood in the doorway and looked at us with a question mark in her eyes. “Now what have you two boys been up to?” she asked.
“Bill just performed a surgical operation,” Dad said and added, “but the patient died.”
“We just had a funeral,” I said.
“A funeral?”
“Warty,” I said.
We told Mom everything, and her eyes took on a faraway expression. I thought I saw tears in them, but she changed the subject by saying, “If the doctor and the undertaker will get washed up, we’ll have breakfast in just a few minutes,” which we did.
Well, that was the end of this part of the story and the end also of both the toad and the snake. It was too terribly bad that Warty had to die, I thought. Still, it was a good thing there had been a big hognose snake around our garden, because it was when Middle-sized Jim got excited that time when the snake had been trying to glide away that he had got what his doctor called “absolute concentration” and had learned to walk and even to run. From then on, he could do both, although, as I said, his run was more of a lurch than a run.
Also, it was Middle-sized Jim’s learning to walk and run that made the most important part of this story happen. I’ll get going on that just as soon as I can.
First, though, I have to tell you about what happened in our garden the next day when Little Jim came over to our house.
He had come to get a copy of one of Mom’s recipes for making a very special kind of pie that Little Jim’s mom had tasted at a potluck dinner at their Sunday school class party. I think it was called lemon meringue. Mom had surprised all the other Sugar Creek mothers by mixing in some chopped black walnuts, and it had tasted wonderful.
Little Jim wanted to know the whole story about Warty, just as it happened to Dad and me.
Poetry was already at my house when Little Jim came, and he and I had just finished making a couple of twig whistles and were blowing them, making a lot of boy noise. We took Little Jim out to the garden, and I told the whole story over again, having already told it to Poetry. Little Jim always listened to stories with his face as well as with both ears. His small, mouselike face with its cherry-shaped mouth got a lot of different kinds of expressions on it while he listened.
When I finished, we were all standing near Warty’s grave, where Poetry had erected a shingle with a poem on it, which he had written himself:
Here lies Warty, the farmer’s best friend.
How sad that he had such a terrible end!
I thought I noticed tears in Little Jim’s eyes as he stood looking down at Poetry’s poetry. Then, as he often does when he has a couple of tears that he doesn’t want anybody to see, he turned his face away, gave his head a quick toss, and when he looked back again, the tears had disappeared. They had fallen on one of Mom’s cabbage plants, maybe. If a cabbage plant could think, it’d probably have been surprised, wondering if it had started to rain saltwater instead of rain.
“Where’d you bury the snake?” Little Jim asked.
“Right over there,” I said, pointing to a little mound of clay without any marker.
Little Jim walked over to it. Then all of a sudden, he let out a gasp and said, “Hey, you guys! Come here! Look!”
Well, you could have knocked me over with the seedpod of a milkweed when I saw what I saw. About nine inches from Little Jim’s brown, bare, dusty feet was a great big, blinking, brown-skinned, warty-looking toad!
Poetry saw it at the same time and exclaimed, “It’s Warty! He’s come back to life!”
I looked down at the warty-skinned amphibian, which is what Middle-sized Jim says a toad is, and he did look exactly like Warty. He was blinking his glassy eyes as though he was thinking some kind of lazy, mischievous thoughts.
But it just couldn’t be Warty, I thought, and said so. “He doesn’t have any snake teeth marks on him.”
“Maybe they healed up,” Little Jim said.
“They couldn’t in only one day,” Poetry said.
“The only way to know for sure is to dig into his grave to see if he came to life and crawled out,” I said.
Dad, hearing all the excitement, came out of the barn.
I saw him and yelled, “Hey, Dad! Come here!”
In a few seconds he was there with us, and we were all standing in a little half circle looking down at the toad’s blinking eyes. Dad reached out the toe of his heavy shoe and touched the toad, which right away filled himself up with air, the way toads do, and looked as tight as a toy balloon at a county fair.
“Do you suppose, maybe, this one is Warty, instead of the one that got swallowed yesterday?” I asked Dad.
Poetry, feeling extra mischievous that day, made up a new poem real quick and said,
“His tummy is so round and firm
Because he ate a fat cutworm.”
Pop ignored Poetry’s poetry, stooped down, and said in a kind, friendly voice, “Warty, my friend, let’s have a look at your left front foot to see if you are you, or if that’s you over there under that tombstone,” meaning under Poetry’s shingle.
When my dad leaned down to Warty and with a small stick tried to get his front foot out where we could see it, all of a sudden that big fat toad gave an acrobatic flip and landed on his back with his brownish stomach exposed to the sky.
“What on earth!” I said, remembering that the hognose snake had done the same thing.
Dad ignored my exclamation and said, “Yep, that’s Warty! See, there’s one toe missing on his left front foot. I accidentally cut it off a week or two ago when I was hoeing several rows of potatoes. The very next day, he disappeared, and I thought that was why he had run away. I thought he didn’t like me anymore and wasn’t going to oblige the Collins family any longer by eating up our cutworms. I didn’t know, of course, that the real reason he ran away was because he was afraid of the snake. Well, well, well, Warty, I won’t hurt you. You can get right back on your tummy again.”
None of us said anything for a minute, as Dad made us all step back about ten or fifteen feet. “Now keep your eyes on him,” he whispered, “and you’ll see some acrobatics that will astonish you”—which we did.
Almost right away, I saw first one and then another awkward toad foot straighten out and rise up in the air, and then with a movement that would make any circus acrobat jealous, that toad gave his body a flip, and there he was right side up again.
And that was that. Warty was still alive! Hurrah!
I felt sorry for the other toad I had caught, though, and had brought to our garden and tied up, and he had been swallowed by the big, ugly, hognose snake. But our old favorite friend Warty was still alive, and that made me feel fine.
All of a sudden, Little Jim was reminded that he was supposed to hurry home with the copy of Mom’s meringue pie recipe. “I’ve got to get going,” he said. “Besides, I haven’t practiced my piano lesson yet.”
That little guy was certainly a great person, I thought, as I watched him crawl through the rail fence and run as fast as his short legs could carry him toward our front gate—where “Theodore Collins” was on the mailbox beside it—scramble onto his bicycle, and ride away.
I looked up at Dad then. “I’ll bet you knew all the time that the toad I was trying to save wasn’t Warty. You did, didn’t you?”
“I’m afraid I did,” he said. “In fact, I was watching you yesterday afternoon while you were tying up your toad with your fishing line. After you had gone to bed last night, I went out to the garden to be sure by taking a look at your toad’s toes. I had a little trouble catching him because he was as scared of me as a cottontail rabbit. He started hopping away in short, quick jumps, almost as fast as a frog jumps, unwinding your reel a little with every jump.”
And that was that, and a very exciting that, at that.