Maybe in case you’ve never read anything about the Sugar Creek Gang before, I’d better tell you that I _am_ red-haired and freckle-faced and do have a fiery temper some of the time, and that my name is Bill Collins. I have a swell mom and pop and a baby sister whose name is Little Charlotte Ann, and I’m the only boy in the Collins family. Not having any older sisters, I have to wash or wipe the dishes two or three times a day and help with some of the other girls’ chores around our house, which maybe is good for me, Pop says, on account of when I wash dishes the hot sudsy water helps to keep my hands and fingernails clean.
I whirled around quick from looking down the hill at the rest of the gang and from seeing Circus who was up the elm sapling trying to see over the crest of the hill, but probably couldn’t. Big Jim had his finger up to his pursed lips for all of us to keep on keeping still, which we did.
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.)
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.”