The pounding had stopped and we could hear footsteps moving along in the woods, getting fainter and fainter, and just that second Big Jim said to us, “He can’t hear us now. His shoes are making so much noise in the leaves.”
We all got to the top in a jiffy, and looked, and Little Jim whispered “It’s somebody wearing old overalls,” which it was, and he was disappearing around the corner of the path that led from the spring down the creek going toward the old sycamore tree and the swamp.
A few jiffies later, Big Jim gave us the signal and all of us broke out of our very painful silence and were acting like ourselves again, but wondering who on earth had been there and what he had been doing, and why, when all of a sudden, Dragonfly who had been looking around with Poetry, looking for shoe tracks, let out a yell and said, “Hey, Gang, come here! Here’s a letter, nailed onto the old Black Widow Stump!” which is the name we’d given the stump after Circus’ Pop had been bitten there.
We all made a rush to where Dragonfly’s dragonfly-like eyes were studying something on the stump, and in a jiffy I was reading the envelope, and it said on it, in a very awkward old handwriting,
URGENT
To the Sugar Creek Gang
(Personal. Please open at once.)
2
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.