Then I heard Little Jim ask something else which showed what a grand little guy he was. "S'pose maybe your mother would like to go with us, too?"
"My mother would like to go with us," Tom said to Little Jim, "but she doesn't have any clothes that're good enough." And knowing the reason why was because her husband drank up nearly all the money he made in the Sugar Creek beer taverns, and also drank whiskey which he bought in the liquor store—knowing that, I felt my teeth gritting hard and I took a fierce swing with the stick I was carrying, at a little maple tree beside me.... I socked that tree so fierce with my stick, that my hands stung so bad they were almost numb; the stick broke in the middle and one end of it flew ahead to where Circus and Dragonfly were and nearly hit them.
"Hey, you!" Dragonfly yelled back toward us, "What you trying to do—kill us?"
"What on earth!" Circus yelled back to me, and I stood looking at the broken end of the rest of the stick in my hand, then turned like a flash and whirled around and threw it as hard as I could straight toward another tree about twenty feet away. That broken stick hit the tree right in the center of its trunk, with a loud whack.
I didn't answer them in words at all. I was so mad at Tom's pop and at beer and whiskey and stuff.
But I couldn't waste all my temper on something I couldn't help, so I kept still and we all went on to the cave, and went in, and followed its long narrow passageway clear through, until we came to the big wooden door which opened into Old Man Paddler's cellar.
As soon as we got there, Circus, who was always the leader of our gang when Big Jim wasn't with us, stopped us, and made us keep still, then he knocked on the door—three knocks, then two, then three more, then two, which was the code the gang always used when we came, so Old Man Paddler would know it was us.
If he was home, he would call down and say in his quavering old voice, "Who's there?" and we'd answer, and right away we'd hear his trap door in the floor of his house open, and hear his steps coming down his stairway and hear him lift the big wooden latch that held the door shut, and then when he'd see us, he'd say, "Well, well, well, well, the Sugar Creek Gang—" then he'd name every one of us by our nicknames, and say, "Come on in, boys, we'll have some sassafras tea," which all of us, especially Little Jim, liked so very much.
Everything was quiet while Circus knocked ... three times, then two, then three, and then two again, while we all waited and listened. There was always something kinda spooky about that knock, and being in a cave I always felt a little queer until I heard the old man's voice answer us. In fact, I always felt creepy until we got inside the cabin and the trap door was down again.
We all stood there, outside that big wooden door, waiting for Old Man Paddler to call down to us, but there wasn't a single sound, so Circus knocked again: three times, then two, then three, and then two again, and we all waited. Except for my little pocket flashlight which my pop had given me for Christmas, we didn't have any light, and we couldn't waste the battery by keeping it on all the time, so I turned it off, but it felt so spooky with it off and nobody answering Circus's knock that I turned it on again just as Dragonfly who was always hearing things first, said, "Psst!" which meant "I heard something mysterious! Everybody keep still a minute," which we did; and then as plain as day I heard it myself, an old man's voice talking. It was high pitched and quavering, and kinda sad-like, like he was begging somebody to do something for him....