The Green Tent Mystery at Sugar Creek

THE GREEN TENT MYSTERY AT SUGAR CREEK
by PAUL HUTCHENS
Published by
SCRIPTURE PRESS SCRIPTURE PRESS PUBLICATIONS, INC. 1825 College Avenue · Wheaton, Illinois
The Green Tent Mystery at Sugar Creek
Copyright, 1950, by Paul Hutchens
All rights in this book are reserved. No part may be reproduced in any manner without the permission in writing from the author, except brief quotations used in connection with a review in a magazine or newspaper.
Printed in the United States of America
IT was the darkest summer night I ever saw—the night we accidentally stumbled onto a brand new mystery at Sugar Creek.
Imagine coming happily home with two of your best pals, carrying a string of seven fish, and feeling wonderful and proud and then, halfway home, when you are passing an old, abandoned cemetery, seeing a light out there and somebody digging! All of a sudden you get a creeping sensation in your spine and your red hair under your straw hat starts to try to stand up—!
Well, that’s the way it started. Nobody in Sugar Creek had died and been buried in that old cemetery for years and years, and it was only good for wild strawberries to grow in and bumblebees to make their nests in and barefoot boys to have their gang meetings in—and also to tell ghost stories to each other in.
And yet, there it was, as plain as the crooked nose on Dragonfly’s thin face, or the short, wide nose on Poetry’s fat face, or the freckled nose on mine—an honest-to-goodness man or something, digging in the light of a kerosene lantern. The lantern itself was standing beside the tall tombstone of Sarah Paddler, Old Man Paddler’s dead wife, and was shedding a spooky light on the man and his nervous movements as he scooped the yellowish-brown dirt out of the hole and piled it onto a fast-growing pile beside him.