WELL sir, I just stood there with all the rest of the members of the Sugar Creek Gang, staring and staring at the envelope and the crazy old handwriting on it that said, “Personal. Please Open at once.”

Big Jim, who, as you already know, is the leader of our gang, reached out and tore the envelope off the nail which had been driven through the envelope’s upper right-hand corner where the stamp would have been if there had been one, and handed it to me. “Read it out loud to all of us,” he said to me.

I couldn’t imagine what was on the inside. I didn’t recognize the handwriting, and couldn’t even guess who had written it.

“Stand back, everybody,” Big Jim ordered. “And let him have plenty of room.”

“Yeah, let him have plenty of room. It might explode,” Dragonfly said. I tore open the envelope in a hurry, and this is what I read:

“Members of the Sugar Creek Gang—Big Jim, Little Jim, Poetry, Circus, Dragonfly, Bill Collins, and Tom Till—as soon as you can, after reading this, make a beeline for Bumblebee Hill, climb through the barbed-wire fence at the top and stop at the tombstone of Sarah Paddler in the old abandoned cemetery. There you will find another letter giving you instructions what to do next. It is VERY IMPORTANT.

Signed ... (Guess Who)”

I read the letter out loud in a sort of trembling voice on account of I was a little bit scared, then I looked around at the different ones of us to see what we were thinking, but couldn’t tell.

“What’ll we do?” Little Jim piped up and said, and Little Tom Till swallowed real hard like he had taken too big a bite of something and was trying to swallow it without having chewed it long enough, then he sort of stuttered, “M-maybe a g-ghost wrote it.”

I looked quick at Dragonfly on account of he believes there is such a thing as a ghost on account his mother thinks there is such a thing, and right away he had a funny expression on his face. Dragonfly’s dragonfly-like eyes looked like they were even larger than they were. “My mother told me to stay out of that cemetery.”

“Aw, fraidy cat,” Poetry said, “there isn’t any such thing as a ghost. Besides, ghosts can’t write.”

“Oh yes, they can!” Dragonfly said. “I saw it in the newspaper once that a senator or something’s speech was written by a ghost writer and—”

“It’s crazy!” Poetry said. “A ghost writer is somebody nobody knows who writes something for somebody and nobody knows it, but it’s a real person and not a ghost, which isn’t.”

It sounded crazy, but Poetry read an awful lot of the many books his pop and mom were always buying for him, and he was as smart as anything.

Little Tom spoke up then and said, “A ghost wouldn’t know that Bumblebee Hill had had its name changed from Strawberry Hill to Bumblebee Hill, would it?” And right away I was remembering that hill, where the gang had had a fierce fight with a town gang when Little Tom had still belonged to that other gang, and we had all of us stirred up a bumblebee’s nest on that hillside and gotten stung in different places, which had hurt worse than each other’s fists had, and the fight had broken up, and we’d given that hill a new name. In that fight as you maybe know, two red-haired boys had had a terrible battle and one of the red-haired freckled-faced boys had licked the other one all to smithereens for awhile, until I had started fighting a little harder and then I’d licked him even worse, all in the same fight.

Big Jim spoke up then and said, “A ghost probably couldn’t spell our names. Anyway, let’s get going to the old cemetery and see what happens.”

With that, Circus was already on his way, running like a deer, with all of us right at his heels as fast as we could go. Talking about spelling must have reminded Poetry of a poem, for, as you know, he was always learning new poems by heart and quoting them to us, he knowing maybe a hundred of them, and you never knew when he was going to start one of them at the wrong time. He hardly ever got to finish one, though, on account of the gang’s stopping him, or else it was too long to finish it before we all thought of something we all’d rather do than listen to his poem.

Anyway, while he and I were puffing along with the rest of the gang toward Bumblebee Hill, he started in puffing out a new one I’d never heard before, and this is the way it went:

“Don’t use the word birch,” I panted to Poetry, and he panted back at me, “Why?”

“’Cause it reminds me of beech, and beech reminds me of a beech switch which reminds me of a schoolteacher and that reminds me of school, and——”

Poetry cut in on my sentence and said, “Birch reminds me of a birch tree away up North where we were on our camping trip once, and where I’d like to go again this year. In fact, it’s getting so hot that I don’t see how we can stand not going up there again.”

I looked out of the corner of my right eye at him as we dashed along behind and beside and in front of the gang toward Bumblebee Hill, and said, “I don’t see why we have to stay where it is so hot ALL summer.”

That started him off on his poem again and he get another whole verse in before we reached the bottom of Bumblebee Hill, and had to have most of our wind for climbing and not much for talking. This is the next verse which he puffed out to me, the poem still talking about a schoolteacher and was:

I found out later how to spell out the poem when he showed it to me in his mother’s old scrapbook. It was a clever poem, I thought.

Puff, puff, puff, up the hill we went, and at the cemetery stopped. It was a real spooky place, all overgrown with weeds, and choke-berry, and blue vervain, and mullein stalks, the blue vervain being one of the very prettiest wild flowers in all Sugar Creek territory, but which all the farmers called a weed, and which maybe it was. But up real close and under a magnifying glass its flowers are very pretty. Just as I was climbing through the fence beside Little Jim, holding two strands of barbed wire far enough apart for him to slither through and not get his nice pretty new blue shirt caught, Little Jim, who is a sort of a dreamer and is always imagining what something or other looks like, said to me, “They look like upside down candelabrums, don’t they?” Little Jim knew I liked flowers myself, on account of my mom liked them so well, and always wanted me to pick some and set them in vases in different parts of our house.

“What looks like what?” Dragonfly said, and sneezed, and I knew right away that he was allergic to something in the cemetery, he being that way about nearly everything in Sugar Creek in the summertime, and when people are allergic to things like that, they nearly always sneeze a lot.

Little Jim finished getting through without getting his shirt caught and said, “The flower spikes which branch off from the stem of the vervain look like upside down candelabrum,” and I remembered that his mother, besides being the best pianist in all Sugar Creek territory, and taught piano and was maybe the prettiest mom of all the Sugar Creek’s Gang’s moms, also had all kinds of flowers in a special flower garden at their home, and she talked flowers so much that Little Jim probably knew all the different kinds of words that people use when they talk flowers.

Little Jim broke off a stalk of vervain, and I noticed that there was a little purplish ring of small flowers at the very bottom of every one of the very slender flower spikes, which is the way vervain do their flowering. They begin with a little purple ring of flowers at the bottom of the spike about the first of July, and the flowers keep on blooming all summer, the ring creeping up higher and higher until school starts about the first of September, and pretty soon the flowers get clear to the top; then kinda like blue rings slipping off the ends of green fingers, they are all gone.

Well, in a jiffy, there we all were, standing around in a sort of half circle, looking over each other’s shoulders and between each other’s heads, right in front of Old Man Paddler’s dead wife’s tall tombstone. Her name had been Sarah Paddler, and she had died a long time ago. There were a couple of other tombstones there too, for the old man’s two boys who had died about the same time many years ago, and that old kind old man, whom the Sugar Creek Gang loved so well, had maybe been using all the love which he had had left over, when his own boys died, and, instead of wasting it on a dog or a lot of other things, he was pouring it out on us live boys instead.

Carved or chiselled on the tombstone was the figure of a hand with the forefinger pointing up toward the sky, and right below the hand were the words:

Standing on a little ledge, and fastened onto the tombstone with what is called scotch tape, was another envelope like the one we had just found and had read down at the Black Widow Stump, and on it it said,

URGENT
To the Sugar Creek Gang
(Personal. Open at once.)

Well, this time Big Jim took the envelope, and handed it to Little Jim who read it in his squeaky voice to all of us, and this is what it said in rhyme:

This time it didn’t say it was signed by “Guess Who,” but the poetry sounded like Poetry’s poetry, and I looked at him and he was busy studying the ground around there to see if he could find any shoe tracks.

“Last one to the sycamore tree is a cow’s tail,” Circus said, and started to make a dive for the cemetery fence just as Dragonfly got a queer look on his face, like he was going to sneeze but wasn’t quite sure whether he was or not. Dragonfly looked toward the sun, which hurt his eyes a little, and that maybe made tears, which, with his face raised like that, tickled his nose on the inside and he let out one of his favorite sneezes, which was half blocked like a football kick, but went off to one side. Then he sneezed again three times, just as fast as if he couldn’t help it, and said, “I’m allergic to something in this old graveyard. I’m allergic to ghosts.”

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, 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.

“I’m thirsty,” Poetry puffed beside me.

“So am I,” I said, and right that second I remembered that when I’d gone to the spring in the first place, more than maybe an hour ago, I’d taken a water pail from our milk house and was supposed to bring back a pail of sparkling cool water, when I came home. “There isn’t any hurry,” Pop had told me, “but when you do come back be sure to bring a pail of water.”

“I will,” I had said to him, and now as we whizzed past the spring, I remembered that the water pail was on a flat stone down at the bottom of the hill at the spring.

“Who do you suppose is writing all these notes?” I said to Poetry, forgetting the water again.

“Yeah, who do you suppose?” Poetry said to me from behind me, he being so fat he couldn’t keep up. “I know something I won’t tell,” he said to me, and when I said, “What?” he said, “Two little ‘niggers’ in a peanut shell.”

“Don’t call ’em niggers!” a voice behind us said, and it was Little Jim’s voice.

“Why not?” Dragonfly wanted to know.

Say, Little Jim’s voice which most of the time was very mild and kind, spoke up like it was angry and said, “’Cause negroes are real people, and ’cause—”

Right that second Little Jim’s words got mixed up with a grunt which came out of his throat at the same time, and sounded so queer I turned around to see what happened, ’cause I knew something had, and my eyes lit on him just in time to see him turn a lopsided flipflop on the ground. He had stumbled over a root with his bare right big toe, or else caught his bare right big toe in his overall leg and stumbled and fell sprawling.

I stopped quick, got bumped into by Poetry, who was behind me, but didn’t fall down myself, whirled around and went back to help Little Jim get up.

Circus and Big Jim were far ahead of us. “Did you get hurt?” Little Tom Till asked, and Little Jim sat up rubbing his elbow and grinning and said, “You shouldn’t call em niggers, ’cause they’re human beings and God made ’em. My mother and dad have adopted a little black boy in Africa for a whole year. You can adopt one for only $52.00 a year.”

Say, that little guy had the most innocent lamb-like look on his face you ever saw. He was always saying things like that, and not a one of us thought he was too religious or anything. In fact, everyone of us had already become Christians ourselves, only most of us weren’t quite as brave as Little Jim was, just talking right out about what we thought, without caring what anybody said, most of us thinking a lot more than we said. Poetry especially was bashful, especially in his Sunday school class, on account of his voice was changing and was more like a duck’s with a bad cold, than a boy’s, and was half man’s and half boy’s voice anyway.

“Come on! you guys!” Dragonfly yelled back to us from up ahead, and we all swished on.

It was quite a long run to the sycamore tree, but we got there quick, and found Circus and Big Jim looking inside the big long opening in its side for the letter or whatever it was we were supposed to find. In a jiffy Circus had it out and was waving it around in the air for us to see, and when we gathered around, we saw that it was an envelope with our names on it, only it was an actual honest-to-goodness letter with a postmark on it which, when I got close enough to see, I saw was Pass Lake, Minnesota.

Say, something in my heart went flippety-flop, and I just knew who the letter was from. For some reason I knew, knew what was going to be inside. It was going to be a letter from the same great big fat man on whose property on Pass Lake we’d had our camp last summer, and he was inviting us to come up again for a week or two or maybe more.

Say, it certainly didn’t take us long to find out that I was right, which I knew I was.

“It’s from Santa Claus!” Dragonfly said, Santa Claus being the name we’d given to the man whom we’d all liked so well on our camping trip and whose wife had made such good blackberry pies.

Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah! We all read the letter, and felt so wonderful inside we wanted to yell and scream.

There was one paragraph in the letter that bothered us, though, and it was, “Be sure, of course, to get your parents’ consent, all of you, and be sure to bring along your fishing tackle. Fishing is good. Little Snow-in-the-face will be eager to see you all. He has been very sick this past week, and has been taken to the government hospital. Be sure to pray for him. His big brother, Eagle Eye, has a real Sunday school going here, but his mother and father are not yet believers on the Lord Jesus Christ, and that makes it hard for him. But Snow-in-the-face is a very brave little Christian.”

Right that second, we heard footsteps coming in our direction, and looking up I saw a dark brown smiling face, a row of shining white teeth with one all-gold tooth right in front, and I knew it was Barry Boyland, Old Man Paddler’s nephew, who had taken us to Pass Lake last year.

“Hi, gang!” he called to us, and we called back to him, “Hello, Barry.” And we all swarmed around him to tell him about the letter and to ask questions, all of us knowing that he was the one who had written the notes for us, just to make the last letter more mysterious and more of a surprise.

Well, it was time to go home, and try to convince our parents that we all needed a vacation very badly. For some reason I wasn’t sure my folks would say I could go.