with something large inside of it. Fastened to one end was a plastic
rope which stretched from the gunny sack back into the elderberry
bushes.
We kept on standing stock-still and staring at the thing. Whatever was
in the sack wasn’t moving at all, not even breathing, I thought, as we
stood studying it and wondering, “What on earth!”
It was large and long and round and very fat and--!
Then like a light turning on in my mind, I knew what was in that brown
burlap bag. I knew it as well as I knew my name was Bill Collins,
Theodore Collins’ only son. “There’s a watermelon in that bag!” I
exclaimed.
Whoever was in that car had probably crawled out into our melon patch,
picked the melon, slipped it into this burlap bag, tied the rope to it,
and had been hiding here in the bushes, pulling the rope and dragging
the melon to him! Doing it that way so nobody would see him walking,
carrying it!
Was I ever stirred up in my mind! Yet, there wasn’t any sense in
getting too stirred up. A boy couldn’t let himself waste his perfectly
good temper in one big explosion, ’cause, as my Pop has told me many a
time, you can’t think straight when you are angry. Pop was trying to
teach me to _use_ my temper, instead of _losing_ it.
“A temper is a fine thing, if you control it, but not if it controls
you,” he has told me maybe five hundred times in my half-long life. As
you maybe already know if you’ve read some of the other Sugar Creek
Gang stories, my hot temper had gotten me into trouble many a time by
shoving me headfirst into an unnecessary fight with somebody who didn’t
know how to control his own temper.
In a flash I was down on my haunches beside the burlap bag. “Here,” I
said to Poetry, “lend me your knife a minute. Let’s get this old burlap
bag off and see if it’s a watermelon!”
“Goose!” Poetry answered me. “I’m wearing my night clothes!” Both of us
were, as you already know. His were green-striped, and mine yellow, as
I’ve already told you. We both looked ridiculous there in the moonlight.
“Look!” Poetry exclaimed. “Here’s how they were going to get it through
the fence!”
My eyes fastened onto the circle of light his flashlight made on a spot
back under the elderberry bushes and I noticed there was a hole cut in
Pop’s new woven-wire fence, large enough to let a boy through. Boy oh
boy, would Pop ever have a hard time using _his_ temper when he saw
that tomorrow morning!
But we _had_ to do something _with_ the melon. “Let’s leave it for the
gang to see tomorrow,” Poetry suggested. “Let Big Jim decide what to do
about it.”
“What to do with Bob Till, you mean,” I said grimly. Already my temper
was telling me it was Bob Till himself, the Sugar Creek Gang’s worst
enemy, who had been trying to steal one of our melons.
Just thinking that started my blood to running faster in my veins.
How many times during the past two years we had had trouble with John
Till’s oldest boy, Bob, and how many times Big Jim, the Sugar Creek
Gang’s fierce-fighting leader, had had to give Bob a licking--and
always Bob was just as bad a boy afterward, and maybe even worse.
I was remembering that only last week at our very latest Gang meeting,
Big Jim had told us: “I’m _through_ fighting Bob Till. I’m going to try
kindness. We’re _all_ going to try it. Let’s show him that a Christian
boy doesn’t have to fight every time somebody knocks a chip off his
shoulder--and let’s not put the chip on our shoulder in the first
place.”
At that meeting, which had been at the spring, Dragonfly had piped up
and asked, “What’s a ‘chip on your shoulder’ mean?”
Poetry had answered for Big Jim by saying, “It’s a doubled-up fist,
shaking itself under somebody else’s nose--daring him to hit you first!”
Big Jim ignored Poetry’s supposed-to-be-funny answer and said, “Bob is
on probation, you know, and he has to behave, or the sentence that is
hanging over him will go into effect and he’ll have to spend a year in
the reformatory. We wouldn’t want that. We have got to help him prove
that he can behave himself. If he thinks we are mad at him, he will be
tempted to do things to get even with us. As long as this sentence is
hang--”
Dragonfly cut in, then, with one of his dumbish questions, at the same
time trying to show how smart he was in school, asking, “What kind of
a sentence--_declarative_, or _interrogative_, or _imperative_, or
_exclamatory?_”
Big Jim’s jaw set, and he gave Dragonfly an exclamatory look. Then he
went on, shocking us almost out of our wits when he told us something
not a one of us knew yet: “One of the conditions of his being on
probation instead of in the reformatory is that he go to church at
least once a week for a year. That means he’ll probably come to _our_
church, and _that_ means he’ll be in our Sunday school class, and--”
I got one of the queerest feelings I ever had in my life. Whirlwindlike
thoughts were spiraling in my mind. I just couldn’t imagine Bob Till
in church and Sunday school. It would certainly seem funny to have
him there with nice clothes on and his hair combed, listening to our
preacher preach from the Bible. What if I had to sit beside him
myself--I, who could hardly think his name without feeling my muscles
tighten and my fists start to double up?
Another thing Big Jim said at that meeting was, “You guys want to
promise that you will stick with me and all of us try to help him?”
And we had promised.
* * * * *
And now here was Bob already doing something that would make the
sentence drop on his head. Whoever was in that car just _had_ to be
Bob Till on account of he had a car just like that--the car being what
people call a “hot rod.”
“Listen!” Poetry exclaimed. I listened in every direction there is,
then I heard and saw at the same time a car coming back up the lane,
its head-lamps hitting us full in the face.
“Quick!” Poetry cried. “Down!”
We stooped low behind the elderberry bushes and waited for the car to
pass.
“Hey!” I said to us. “It’s slowing down. It’s going to stop,” which it
did. The same rattling old jalopy. In a split jiffy we were scooting
along the fence row to a spot about twenty-five feet farther up the
lane. And there we crouched behind some giant ragweeds and goldenrod
and orange-rayed, black-eyed Susans--Pop having ordered me a week ago
to cut down the ragweeds with our scythe, and I hadn’t done it yet.
I nearly always cut the goldenrod too, on account of Dragonfly, the
pop-eyed member of our Gang, is allergic to them as well as to the
ragweeds and he nearly always uses this lane going to and from school.
My heart was pounding in my ears as I crouched there with Poetry, he in
his green-striped pajamas and I in my plain yellow ones.
“Get down!” I hissed to him.
“I _am_ down,” he whispered.
“Flatter!” I ordered him, “so you won’t be seen! Can’t you lie _flat?_”
“I can only lie round,” he answered saucily, which, under any other
circumstances, would have sounded funny, he being so extra large around.
“Somebody is getting out,” Poetry whispered.
“How many are there?”
“Only one, I think.”
Then I felt Poetry’s body grow tense. “There goes one of your
watermelons,” he hissed to me.
I saw it at the same time he did--the brown burlap bag being pulled
deeper into the elderberry bushes--and I knew somebody was actually
stealing one of our melons. In a jiffy it would be gone!
“Let’s jump him,” I exclaimed to Poetry. My blood was tingling for
battle. I started to my feet, but he stopped me, saying, “_Sh!_” in a
subdued but savage whisper. “Detectives don’t stop a man from stealing;
they let him do it first, then they capture him.”
It wasn’t an easy thing to do--to do nothing, watching that watermelon
being hoisted into the back seat of that car. My muscles were aching
to get into some new kind of action that was different from hoeing
potatoes, milking cows, gathering eggs, and other things any ordinary
boy’s muscles could do. I was straining to go tearing up the fence row
to the elderberry bushes, dive through the hole in the fence, make a
football-style tackle on that thief’s hind legs and bring him down. I
was pretty sure, if all the Gang had been there, one or the other of
us wouldn’t have been able to stay stopped stock-still. He would have
rushed in, and the rest of us would be like Jack, in the poem about
“Jack and Jill”--we would go tumbling after, even if some of us got
knocked down and got our crowns cracked.
But the rest of the Gang wasn’t there. Besides it was already too late
to do anything. In less time than it has taken me to write it, the
melon in the gunny sack was in the car. The thief was in the driver’s
seat, and the hot rod was shooting like an arrow with two blazing heads
down the moonlit lane.
Poetry shot a long powerful beam from his flashlight straight toward
the car, socking it on the license plate, and I knew his mind--which is
so good it’s almost like what is called a “photographic mind”--would
remember the number if he had been able to see it.
It’s like having a big blown-up balloon suddenly burst in your face to
have your excited adventure come to an end like that; kinda like a fish
must feel when it’s nibbling on a fat fishing worm down in Sugar Creek
and, all of a disappointing sudden, having its nice juicy dinner jerked
away from it by the fisherman who is on the other end of the line.
There wasn’t anything left to do except go back to the tent and to bed
and to sleep.
Just thinking that reminded me of the fact that I probably would need
another pair of pajamas to sleep in, the yellow pair I had on having
gotten soiled while I was lying in the grass behind the goldenrod and
ragweed and black-eyed Susans. “We’ll have to wash our feet again
before we can crawl into Mom’s nice clean sheets,” I said, as we
started to start back to the tent.
“Maybe it would be easier and cause less worry for your mother if we
just climbed into our cots and went to sleep, and tomorrow if your
mother gets angry at us we can explain about the watermelon and that
will get her angry at the thief instead of at us. We could offer to
help her _wash_ the sheets, anyway.”
It was a pair of very sad, very mad boys that threaded their way
through the watermelon patch to the pasture and across it to the gate
at the barn and on toward the tent. There were still a few cicadas
busy with their drums, I noticed, in spite of the fact that I was all
stirred up in my mind about the watermelon. Thinking about the seeds
in their long, straight rows, buried in the dark red flesh of the
watermelon, like seeds always are, just like somebody had planted them,
reminded me of the stars in the sky overhead, and I was wishing I could
actually look up and see the Dog Star, which is the brightest star in
all the Sugar Creek sky but which, during dog days--which are the hot
and sultry days of July and August--you have to get up in the morning
to see--on account of the Dog Star always comes up with the sun in July
and August and, in a very little while, fades out of sight.
In the winter, in February, the Dog Star is almost straight overhead at
night and is like a shining star at the top of a Christmas tree--but
who wants to go out in the middle of a zero-cold night just to look at
a star, even if it is the brightest one that ever shines?
“Are you sleepy?” Poetry asked me, when we reached the plum tree.
“Not very,” I said, “but I’m still so mad I can’t see straight.”
“You want to go back down to the spring with me?” he asked, his hand on
the tent awning, about to lift it for us to go in.
“Are you crazy?” I asked.
“I’m a detective. I want to go down there and see if we can find the
oiled paper you threw away when we heard those girls at the top of the
hill.”
“My mother has dozens of old bread wrappers,” I told him. “I’ll ask her
for one for you in the morning.”
“Listen, Chum,” Poetry whispered, as he let the tent awning drop
into place and grabbed me by the arm, “I said I’m a detective, and
I’m looking for a clue! I’ve a hunch there was something in that
paper--something whoever put it in that melon, didn’t want to get wet!”
I knew, from having studied about watermelons that summer, that the
edible part of a watermelon is made up of such things as protein, and
fat, and ash, and calcium, and sugar and water and just fibre. Six per
cent of the melon is sugar and over ninety-two per cent is water. You
could eat a piece of watermelon the size of Charlotte Ann’s head and
it would be like drinking more than a pint of sweetened water. I could
understand that anything anybody put on the inside of the melon would
get wet, almost as wet as if you had dunked it in a pail of water.
“Look,” I said to Poetry, “I don’t want to show my face or risk my neck
anywhere near a campful of excitable girls who can’t tell a boy in a
pair of red-striped pajamas from a zebra and who might start screaming
bloody murder if they happened to see us again.”
“I’ll have to go alone, then,” Poetry announced firmly, and in a jiffy,
his fat green-striped back was all I could see of him as he waddled off
across the moonlit lawn toward the walnut tree and the gate.
* * * * *
It was either let him go alone on a wild goose chase, or go with him
and run the risk of stumbling into a whirlwind of honest-to-goodness
trouble.
I caught up to him by the time he had reached “Theodore Collins” on
our mailbox, and whispered to him, “What do you think might have been
wrapped up in it?”
Poetry’s voice sounded mysterious, and also very serious, as he
answered, “Didn’t you read the paper this morning?”
I nearly always read the daily paper, part of it anyway, almost as soon
as it landed in the mailbox, sometimes racing to get to the box before
Pop did. Pop himself always read the editorials and Mom, the fashions
and the new recipes and the accidents, and also _worried_ about the
accidents outloud to Pop a little. Mom always felt especially sad
whenever anything had happened to a little baby.
“Sure,” I puffed to Poetry as I loped along after him in the shadowy
moonlight. “What’s that got to do with a wad of oiled paper in a
plugged watermelon?”
His answer as it came panting back over his fat shoulder, started the
shivers vibrating in my spine again--and if I had been a cicada with a
sound-producing organ inside me somewhere, my shaking thoughts would
have filled the whole woods with noise.
Here are Poetry’s gasping words, “Whoever broke into the Super Market
last week might be hiding out in this part of the county--maybe even
along the creek here somewhere!”
“The paper didn’t say that,” I said.
“It didn’t have to,” Poetry shouted back. “It didn’t say where he _was_
hiding, did it? I’ve got a hunch he’s right here in our territory.
Maybe in the swamp or----”
I’d had a lot of experiences with Poetry’s hunches, and he’d been right
so many times, that whenever he said he had one, I felt myself getting
all of a sudden in a mood for a big surprise of some kind.
But this time his idea didn’t seem to make sense--not quite, anyway,
so I said, “Who on earth would want to stuff a lot of money inside a
watermelon?”
Poetry’s answer was a grouchy grunt, followed by a scolding: “I said I
had a _hunch!_ I _know_ we’ll find something important going on around
here ... Now, stop asking dumb questions and hurry up!” With that,
that barrel-shaped, detective-minded boy set a still faster pace for
me as we dashed down the hill to the place where I had just had the
humiliating experience of riding a wild green, legless bronco in a
reservoir full of cold water.
The red-striped pajamas I had been wearing must have made me look
ridiculous to those girl scouts, I thought. I hoped they wouldn’t come
back to the spring again while Poetry and I were looking for what he
called a “clue.”
4
Several times, before that night was finally over, I thought how much
more sensible we had been if we had curled ourselves up in our cots in
the tent and gone sound asleep.
It’s better to be in bed when you have your night clothes on than
scouting a watermelon patch or splashing in a pool of spring water or
crouching shivering behind ragweeds and goldenrod and black-eyed Susans
in a fence row, or searching with a flashlight for a wad of oiled paper
which somebody has stuffed into a watermelon.
Especially is it better to be in bed, like any decent boy should be,
than to be lying on your stomach under an evergreen tree with pine
needles pricking you and you don’t dare move or you’ll be heard by
somebody you are straining your eyes to see, while he does the most
ridiculous thing you ever heard of at the very spring where you
yourself were just an hour ago.
Boy oh boy, let me tell you about what happened, the second time Poetry
and I went to the spring that night.
When we came to the beech tree, on whose close-grained gray bark the
Gang and maybe thirty other people had carved their initials through
the years, we stopped to look the situation over. There was a stretch
of moonlit open space about twenty yards wide between us and the
leaning linden tree which is at the top of the incline leading down to
the spring.
The shadowy hulk of the old black widow stump in the middle of the
moonlit space looked like a black ghost. I kept straining my ears in
the direction of the linden tree wondering if there might be anybody
down at the spring; also I kept my ears and my eyes focused in the
direction of the pawpaw bushes away off to the left where the girls’
camp was. I could smell the odor of wet ashes and I knew that the
girls had had a campfire near the black widow stump--there being an
outdoor fireplace there for picnickers to use for wiener roasts, steak
fries, and for making coffee--and also for giving a picnic a friendly
atmosphere. I was only half glad to notice that the girls had put out
the very last spark of their fire, ’cause I hated to have to admit
that a flock of girls knew one of the most important safety rules of a
good camper, which is: “Never leave a campfire burning, but put it out
before you go.”
From the beech tree we moved east maybe a hundred feet, then made a
moonlit dash for the row of evergreens which border the rail fence that
skirts the top of the hill above the bayou.
“Okay,” Poetry panted when we got there. “We’ll work our way down from
here. As soon as we get to the bottom, we’ll turn on the light and
start looking for our clue.”
And then I heard something--a noise out in the creek somewhere, as
plain as a Dog Star sunrise. It was the sound of an oar in a rowlock.
Poetry and I shushed each other at the same time, straining our ears in
the shadowy direction the sound had come from.
At the same instant, we dropped down onto the pine needles under the
tree.
“It’s somebody in a boat,” Poetry whispered. “He’s pulling in at the
spring.”
I could see the boat now, emerging from the shadow of the trees down
the shore. It had come up the creek from the direction of the Sugar
Creek bridge.
Now the boat was being steered toward the shore. I knew if it was
anybody who knew the shoreline, he wouldn’t stop directly in front of
the spring, ’cause the overflow drained into the creek there and it
would be a muddy landing. Below it, or just above it, was a good place.
“There’s only one man in it,” Poetry said. Even in the shadowy
moonlight, I could tell it was a red boat and one we’d never seen
before.
Then I did get a startled surprise, and my whole mind began whirling
with wondering what on earth in a gunny sack! No sooner had the prow of
the boat touched the gravelled shore than whoever was in it was up and
out and beaching the boat, wrapping the guy rope, which is called a
“painter,” around the small maple that grew there. Then he stepped back
into the boat, stooped, picked up something in both hands--something
dark and long and----!
“Hey!” my mind’s voice was screaming, while my _actual_ voice was
keeping still. “It’s a gunny sack! It’s the old brown burlap bag we saw
in the watermelon patch a half hour ago!”
In a minute the man was out of the boat and disappearing in the path
in the shadow of the trees we knew about. A second later, he emerged
at the opening in the board fence, worked his way through, and moved
straight toward the spring, lugging the burlap bag with the melon in it.
“Let’s jump him!” I whispered to Poetry.
Poetry put his lips to my ear and whispered back, “Nothing doing.
Detectives don’t capture a criminal _before_ he commits a crime. They
let him do it first, _then_ they capture him!”
“He’s already done it,” I said, “at the melon patch!”
“If you’ll be patient,” Poetry whispered back, “we’ll find out what we
want to know.”
We kept on watching from behind the evergreen while the man at the
spring hoisted his burlap bag over the cement lip of the pool and let
it down inside. He stayed in a stooping, stock-still position for
several jiffies, then began doing something with his hands.
“He’s about the size of Big Jim,” I whispered to Poetry.
“Or Circus,” he answered.
“Big Jim,” I insisted--only I knew that neither of them would steal a
watermelon and bring it here by night in a boat.
Just then I shifted my position a little on account of I had been
sitting on my foot and it was beginning to hurt. It was a crazy time
to lose my balance and have to struggle awkwardly to keep from sliding
down the incline, but that is what I did, and for a few anxious seconds
I was looking after myself instead of watching the mysterious movements
at the spring.
When, a jiffy later, I was focusing my vision in his direction, the man
or extra large boy--whichever he was--had left the spring and was on
his way back to the boat. For a split second we lost sight of him in
the shadows, then we saw him again with his back to us at the boat,
heard the painter being unwrapped from the tree.
In only a few more seconds the boat was gliding out into the creek--but
only a few feet, for right away the oarsman steered it toward the shore
and it became only a dim outline in the shadow of the trees that grew
along the steep incline.
Poetry, beside me, sighed an exasperated sigh and said, “Well, it
wasn’t any of _our_ Gang, anyway. Look!”
I had already seen--first the flash of a match or a cigarette lighter,
then a reddish glow in the dark, and I knew somebody was smoking a
cigarette or a cigar. That’s how I knew for sure it wasn’t any of the
Gang.
“I’d like to get my hands on him, for just one minute,” I said to
Poetry. “Both hands--twenty times--in fast succession.”
“You wouldn’t strike a woman or a girl, would you?” he answered.
“What? Who said it was a woman or a girl? He had on a pair of trousers,
didn’t he?”
“Girls wear slacks, don’t they? And lots of girls smoke, too.”
“And shouldn’t,” I answered.
We crept from our hiding place, scrambled down to where the boat
had been beached and looked to be sure the oarsman--or oarswoman or
oarsgirl--was out of sight. Then we slipped through the fence to look
into the cement pool to see the melon and also to look around for the
wad of paper I had tossed away when I had been here before.
I tell you it was an interesting minute--or three minutes, I should
say--’cause that’s all the time it took us to discover some thing very
important--very, _very_ important!
Say, did you ever have a flashlight strike you full in the face and
blind you for a few seconds? Well, the white light from the match or
cigarette lighter and the reddish glow from the cigarette or cigar
fifty yards down the shore, sort of blinded me--not my eyes, but
my mind. I couldn’t think straight for a minute. It was Poetry’s
suggestion, though--that the thief might be a woman or a girl--that
really confused me.
I guess all the time I had had it in the back of my mind that the thief
was Bob Till--but what if the person in the boat was a _girl!_ No
wonder I couldn’t think, I thought.
It was the perfume that sent my mind whirling. We noticed it the very
second we had crawled through the fence. It was so strong it made the
whole place smell as if somebody had upset the perfume counter in
the Sugar Creek Dime Store and half the bottles of cologne and fancy
perfumes had been broken.
If Dragonfly had been with us, I thought, he’d have sneezed and sneezed
and sneezed, on account of he is allergic to almost every perfume there
is.
Well, that was our chance to make a quick search for the wad of oiled
paper which is what we had come there for in the first place. I
remembered just about where I had tossed it and in only a few seconds
Poetry hissed, “Here it is! Here’s our clue!”
His excitement about the thing and his being so sure, had built up my
mind to expect to see something wonderful inside that oiled paper.
Anybody who would go to the trouble to steal and deliver a watermelon
secretly in a boat at night, would probably leave something _in_ the
melon worth a hundred times more than the melon itself.